Linda M. Gojak – författare

Your user’s guide to the mathematics standards

In the 12 short months since the ELA versions of The Common Core Companions, Grades K-2 and 3-5, burst on the scene, they’ve already assisted tens of thousands of teachers with the day-to-day “what you do.” Teachers’ one big criticism: what about mathematics? Luckily NCTM past-president Linda Gojak and mathematics coach Ruth Harbin Miles stepped up to the task. The result? That version of the mathematics standards you wish you had.

Page by page, The Common Core Mathematics Companions clearly lay out:

The mathematics embedded in each standard for a deeper understanding of the content Examples of what effective teaching and learning look like in the classroom   Connected standards within each domain so teachers can better appreciate how they relate Priorities within clusters so teachers know where to focus their time The three components of rigor: conceptual understanding, procedural skills, and applications Vocabulary and suggested materials for each grade-level band with explicit connections to the standards Common student misconceptions around key mathematical ideas with ways to address them

Don’t spend another minute poring over the mathematics standards. Gojak and Miles have already done the heavy-lifting for you. Focus instead on how to teach them, using The Common Core Mathematics Companion as your one-stop guide for teaching, planning, assessing, collaborating, and designing powerful mathematics curriculum.

Your user’s guide to the mathematics standards

In the 12 short months since the ELA versions of The Common Core Companions, Grades K-2 and 3-5, burst on the scene, they’ve already assisted tens of thousands of teachers with the day-to-day “what you do.” Teachers’ one big criticism: what about mathematics? Luckily NCTM past-president Linda Gojak and mathematics coach Ruth Harbin Miles stepped up to the task. The result? That version of the mathematics standards you wish you had.

Page by page, The Common Core Mathematics Companions clearly lay out:

The mathematics embedded in each standard for a deeper understanding of the contentExamples of what effective teaching and learning look like in the classroom  Connected standards within each domain so teachers can better appreciate how they relatePriorities within clusters so teachers know where to focus their timeThe three components of rigor: conceptual understanding, procedural skills, and applicationsVocabulary and suggested materials for each grade-level band with explicit connections to the standardsCommon student misconceptions around key mathematical ideas with ways to address them

Don’t spend another minute poring over the mathematics standards. Gojak and Miles have already done the heavy-lifting for you. Focus instead on how to teach them, using The Common Core Mathematics Companion as your one-stop guide for teaching, planning, assessing, collaborating, and designing powerful mathematics curriculum.

Selected as the Michigan Council of Teachers of Mathematics winter book club book! Rich tasks, collaborative work, number talks, problem-based learning, direct instruction…with so many possible approaches, how do we know which ones work the best? In Visible Learning for Mathematics, six acclaimed educators assert it’s not about which one—it’s about when—and show you how to design high-impact instruction so all students demonstrate more than a year’s worth of mathematics learning for a year spent in school. That’s a high bar, but with the amazing K-12 framework here, you choose the right approach at the right time, depending upon where learners are within three phases of learning: surface, deep, and transfer. This results in “visible” learning because the  effect is tangible. The framework is forged out of current research in mathematics combined with John Hattie’s synthesis of more than 15 years of education research involving 300 million students.  Chapter by chapter, and equipped with video clips, planning tools, rubrics, and templates, you get the inside track on which instructional strategies to use at each phase of the learning cycle:  Surface learning phase: When—through carefully constructed experiences—students explore new concepts and make connections to procedural skills and vocabulary that give shape to developing conceptual understandings. Deep learning phase: When—through the solving of rich high-cognitive tasks and rigorous discussion—students make connections among conceptual ideas, form mathematical generalizations, and apply and practice procedural skills with fluency. Transfer phase: When students can independently think through more complex mathematics, and can plan, investigate, and elaborate as they apply what they know to new mathematical situations.  To equip students for higher-level mathematics learning, we have to be clear about where students are, where they need to go, and what it looks like when they get there. Visible Learning for Math brings about powerful, precision teaching for K-12 through intentionally designed guided, collaborative, and independent learning.

“This book is a must-have for anyone who has faced the challenge of teaching problem solving. The ideas to be learned are supported with a noticeably rich collection of classroom-ready problems, examples of student thinking, and videos. Problem solving is at the center of learning and doing mathematics. And so, Mathematize It! should be at the center of every teacher’s collection of instructional resources.”

John SanGiovanni Coordinator, Elementary Mathematics Howard County Public School System, Ellicott City, MD Help students reveal the math behind the words “I don’t get what I’m supposed to do!” This is a common refrain from students when asked to solve word problems. Solving problems is about more than computation. Students must understand the mathematics of a situation to know what computation will lead to an appropriate solution.  Many students often pluck numbers from the problem and plug them into an equation using the first operation they can think of (or the last one they practiced). Students also tend to choose an operation by solely relying on key words that they believe will help them arrive at an answer, which without careful consideration of what the problem is actually asking of them. Mathematize It! Going Beyond Key Words to Make Sense of Word Problems, Grades K-2 shares a reasoning approach that helps students dig into the problem to uncover the underlying mathematics, deeply consider the problem’s context, and employ strong operation sense to solve it. Through the process of mathematizing, the authors provide an explanation of a consistent method—and specific instructional strategies—to take the initial focus off specific numbers and computations and put it on the actions and relationships expressed in the problem.   Sure to enhance teachers’ own operation sense, this user-friendly resource for Grades K-2

·         Offers a systematic mathematizing process for students to use when solving word problems

·         Gives practice opportunities and dozens of problems to leverage in the classroom

·         Provides specific examples of questions and explorations for addition and subtraction of whole numbers as well as early thinking for multiplication and division

·         Demonstrates the use of concrete manipulatives to model problems with dozens of short videos

·         Includes end-of-chapter activities and reflection questions

How can you help your students understand what is happening mathematically when solving word problems? Mathematize it! 

This expansion of the popular Common Core Mathematics Companions provides indexes for states implementing state-specific mathematics standards and shows which are the same as CCSS-M, which differ and how.