Have you ever wondered why students often struggle with problem solving in math? Well, problem solving is… challenging! And, if problem solving is difficult, then teaching how to solve problems is even more demanding. There are some common reasons we believe teachers struggle to support students in developing problem solving skills.

As students and teachers have traversed the educational landscape throughout the last year, two things are very certain. The first, is that teachers, schools, and districts have had to adapt their systems and structures of instruction to meet the needs of their students. The second, is that as a result of that adaptation, great teaching and learning has taken place.

As classroom teachers we spend hours setting up our physical classroom environment and spend weeks building a community of learners, so now is the time to really reflect on the things that we say as teachers that will benefit our student’s mathematical conversations. If you choose one or two of these Teacher Discourse Moves to focus on for the next few weeks, you will see your students begin to engage in deeper mathematical conversations, arguments and begin to ask questions of each other.

Clothesline Math is nicknamed the master number sense maker because it requires students to think harder about quantities while simultaneously making it easier to see their relationships to each other. To create this tool in your classroom, simply hang a long string—like a clothesline—somewhere that all students can see and interact easily with. The numbers for the clothesline are created by folding paper or index cards in half and writing the numbers on the front. They can be integers, fracti

As a math educator, how often do we hear students stating, “I know how to do this”? Read more to find out how changing one word in the statement “I know how to do this” assesses multiple knowledge domains and unveils a student’s comprehensive understanding of a concept.

Can students think, negotiate, and strategize as mathematicians do? The learning experiences created in the Common Core classroom must concurrently enable students to understand the content and to see themselves as mathematicians. Here’s how you can prompt your students to use mathematical practices while solving problems!