Blog

Author Bill Wellock from FSU News shares an article that talks in greater detail about the CGI training program, its transition to a digital setting, and the ways in which teachers were able to thrive throughout this process.

As an educator, I believe that supporting authentic classroom discussions is one of the most important things we can do with our students.

At the beginning of this year, I felt exactly how I felt during my very first year of teaching.  It dawned on me that I am a first-year pandemic teacher with twenty-five years of teaching experience.

In many households, expectations for parents to be involved in helping their children learn mathematics feels higher now than ever. We think that all parents can benefit from having a few guiding principles for supporting their child’s math learning at home.

Recently, I was asked to share my thoughts on remote learning and technology that may help teachers as they navigate through these changing times. To me, one of the most challenging questions was this. How do we break down the barrier of physical distance to best communicate with our students?

Seesaw has allowed me to hear from my students while they explain their thinking for all content areas but most specifically demonstrating and explaining how they work through a math problem.

What topic in elementary math is so important for later achievement and yet so little understood? If you think the answer is “fractions,” you are not alone.

Shut the Box provides an excellent way to help children build their fluency with addition facts, and I think more teachers should have it in their repertoire.

So now that we know that there is a significant problem with how our students view the equals sign, how do we implement the suggestions put forth in Part 1 of this blog? How do we get students to understand that the equals sign means a relation between values on either side of the equals sign?

The Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching (PAEMST) is our nation’s highest honor awarded to K–12 mathematics and science teachers. Awardees receive $10,000, a personal letter from the POTUS, a trip to Washington, DC, and more.

We spent some time in Toni Laughrey’s classroom in December. She had so many creative ideas in play in her classroom, we thought we just had to share some here. Here are a few of our favorites.

Pop quiz: True or false? 1=1. You’re probably thinking, “Of course it’s true! Obviously 1 equals 1!” Is it really obvious, though?

Classroom observations were once a part of my Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) Teacher Professional Development (PD) sessions. I loved bringing teachers to an expert CGI teacher’s classroom so that they could watch a math lesson. The teachers told me that they loved seeing these lessons. Although everyone loved these visits, I started to wonder what teachers were actually learning from these observations.

Have you ever noticed that the = button on a calculator means something different than how we use = on paper? Unfortunately, our elementary students tend to view the equals sign just as if they were pressing the enter button on a calculator.

Despite the importance of = as a relational operator in mathematics that is used at all levels K–20 (and beyond), many elementary, secondary, and even post-secondary mathematics students have a limited understanding of the intended meaning of that symbol in mathematics.