On Common Core--Installment 2

"The bottom line is that this is a journey that we are on and, hopefully, the outcome will be that our students become better math learners and improve their ability to succeed later in life.  This is always the goal I am striving for in my classroom."

In case you haven't read it, this is how I finished up installment 1.  I want to reiterate this statement because it really gets at the core beliefs that I hold about mathematics teaching.  This has been my core belief all through my 24 years of teaching.

When I first started it was 1993 and we were in the era of the NCTM standards.  The National Council of Teacher's of Mathematics recognized that there was a problem with mathematics teaching and was attempting to provide teachers with outreach education that would help them teach students in ways that would help students really make sense of the math they were learning.  There were many explorations and activities that we tried.  We were making progress towards the larger goal of improving math education for all.

Then, in 2001, NCLB was passed.  Soon, we were mired in the era of fill-in-the-bubble standardized tests.  Test scores were king.  Teachers were told "Teach to the test! Teach only to the test."

Traditional teaching, lecture, note taking, algorithms and memorization became the norm.   Students weren't understanding the math and they went on to college and went into fields that specifically did not require any more mathematics study because they hated it so much.  I'll let you in on a little secret--the teacher's hated it too!

With Common Core, we have begun to de-emphasize the bubble sheet and emphasize problem solving and critical thinking skills.  We have the Eight Standards for Mathematical Practice as a guide to what behaviors we need to encourage in our students.  We're back where we were in the late 90's trying to help students think and reason again.

Because of this shift, I have begun to engage my students in some new activities in our classroom.  One of these activities is called a Math Talk (from the book Making Number Talks Matter).  In a math talk, students try to calculate the answer to a problem in their heads.  The problems are fairly simple problems.  After everyone has indicated they think they know the answer, students volunteer their solutions.  Then the real talk begins!  Students volunteer to explain the method they used to solve the problem to the class.  Often, we find that there are 4 or 5 different ways that students arrive at the correct answer.  If a student calculated the answer incorrectly and is willing, that student will explain the error in their thinking to the class.  Sometimes, we even try to come up with alternative ways to solve the problem that had not been used.

With math talks, students are learning how to communicate mathematics verbally and to find multiple ways of solving a problem.  Students are learning to estimate and make sense of operations.  Students are learning that mistakes are simply pathways to better learning and they are even excited to volunteer to describe their mistaken thinking because they think it is cool to figure out their mistakes!

http://www.stenhouse.com/html/making-number-talks-matter.htm