Thank you Lisa for sharing this with me today. It is worthy of me sharing it with a larger audience.

We were taking the beginning of the year Number Talk assessment today, and a student turned and said, “This is so hard!” The student next her said, “That’s a fixed mindset,” to which student 1 said, “I know, I am not done, I am going to struggle through this.”

I LOVE growth mindset.

Celebrate good times…
Lisa

Three years ago Ron Ritchhart, from Project Zero introduced a thinking routine called Claim, Support, Question to me along with the rest of the MUS staff. He introduced it with a game called Sprouts. This simple routine has revolutionized my teaching. In a nutshell, Calm, Support, Question supports students in making conjectures or claims about anything they notices in their math lesson and guides them in proving or disproving those claims. This routine has created opportunities to make the students thinking visible and allows me as the teacher to identify misconceptions, deepen student conceptual understanding, and push student thinking far beyond the expectations of the content standards. Claim, Support, Question encourages students to behave like mathematicians and provides opportunities for students to develop the mathematical practice standards.

I presented how we use Claim, Support, Question at CMC South and CMC North with the game Werewolves in the Night. This year I have switched to using the game Poison to introduce the routine for a strategic purpose. Poison is a very simple two-person game played with 10 objects in a cup. Opponents alternate turns, taking either one or two objects out of the cup until all the objects are gone. The person who takes the last object is poisoned.

MUS has adopted a new curriculum. Like the game of Poison, on the surface many of the lessons look to be very simple. Also, like the game of Poison, when you provide opportunities for students to make claims and ask questions about things they notice, the levels of thinking, connection making, and conceptual understanding are endless. This can be true for any curriculum or lesson that is open ended and inquiry based.

With Claim, Support, Question I learned that:
• some 3rd grade students think that between 500 and 800 can only mean 650.
• some 5th graders believed it was coincident that 4.5 x 36 was equal to 45 x 3.6 even though they just got a 100% on their multiplying fractions unit test.
• some students believed that one game of Werewolves in the Night can be played for eternity.
• during a number talk, a 3rd grader claimed and supported with evidence that multiples of 6 also contain multiples of 2 and 3.
• that a math lesson can be so open ended and exciting if the teacher is willing to let it go in a strategic direction and has the math content knowledge to know where it is going.

Once teachers have invested time in teaching their students to make claims and support them with evidence, games, number talks, math lessons, and classroom discourse have never been the same.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/parents-join-nationwide-boycott-of-common-core-exam/

The other day a parent shared with me this CBS story about parents boycotting the common core exam. I appreciate the press that our educational system is getting but wish it was more accurate. Based on this type of press and others like it in social media, I understand why anyone would oppose the common core. I on the other-hand do not. This is my response to the parent who sent me the video.

Thanks. I have not seen the video until today. I don’t have the same perspective as the woman in the video. As a parent, I am grateful that my children will be learning the curriculum outlined in the common core standards and not the retired California standards. I want my kids to grow up to be critical thinkers, sense makers, communicators, and problem solvers. These are all things that are brought out in the common core standards and were scarce in the retired California standards. With that said, there are many challenges we face with the transition to the new standards. The standards identify the content only. They do not identify the materials or instructional strategies. At MUS, as well with other districts, we are charged with identifying those strategies and materials in a very short time frame and in some cases having to develop our own as the transition period for common core is shorter than curriculum developers and trainers can keep up with. Common core is a change for teachers, students, and parents.

The common core is far from perfect. My biggest criticism of common core is the short transition period. The common core standards came out in 2010 but schools were held accountable to take the CST test which assessed the now retired California content standards until 2013. That means that most schools only had the 2013-2014 school year to completely revamp the content they taught, the curriculum, and the teaching strategies they use. In one academic year, teachers have been asked to undo what they spent at least a year of graduate school and many years of teaching mastering and totally revamp their role as a teacher. They have been asked to do this without all the supports they got when they first entered their career in education.

This change also has an impact on students. Students grew to learn that a good student sits quietly in class, listens carefully to the instructions and procedures of the teachers, and then quickly mimics those processes on their own. Now they are asked to try out their own ideas first, think about the ideas of others, and make sense of their learning. Kids never had to make sense of fractions or long division. Now they do. The hardest part of this change is students now have to make sense out of their current learning that builds upon their sense making from their past learning. The challenge is that the past learning they are building on did not have to make sense.

The CBS video has a particular focus on the testing of common core. I am not a fan of standardized testing and the need to rank schools by how well their students perform on a test. I do however appreciate the opportunity to see how much our children have grown and how they measure compared to their grade level expectations set by the common core standards. The parent in the video criticizes, “teaching to the test”. I believe that teaching to the test is a wonderful thing if we have the right test. The past California CST test did a great job of assessing how well students could select the correct multiple choice answer to a series of low level questions. Schools that taught to the CST test lowered their rigor as test taking strategies and the memorization of rules were more efficient than teaching students to think. With common core comes about a new type of assessment with few multiple choice questions and many opportunities for students to communicate their thinking and to analyze the thinking of others. If teaching to the common core test means that I have to teach my students to be critical thinkers, writers, and problem solvers then I support it. This is yet to be seen.

The mother in the CBS story also talked about how her 10 year-old child did not know what social studies was and listed that as another criticism of the common core. The common core standards actually promote more science and social studies as the language arts standards are explicitly connected to reading and writing in the content areas. Walk into any one of our classrooms at my school and chances are that most students would also say they don’t do social studies. They spend hours a day reading expository texts and writing about the impact of decisions on society. They debate, research, and respond to both past and current events. Is that language arts or is it social studies?

To conclude, I am grateful my 3 children will be educated in a common core world. I am grateful that we are educating our future workforce to be critical thinkers and sense makers. I wish educators and students would have another year or two before the high stakes testing begins to really strengthen our art of teaching. I wish curriculum developers had more time to really create better instructional materials rather than stick new labels on the old materials. I wish “the common core” did a better job of educating the public.

I first introduced number talks to my school a little over a year ago. With a few professional developments and resources, slowly they have expanded throughout our school. It is powerful to see students fluently solve problems with conceptual understanding, while using numbers flexibly and creatively.

Our guiding resource is Number Talks, by Sherry Parrish. I love this book and highly recommend it as a good starting point. It does a great job with developing understanding with addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of whole numbers. Where the book falls short, is extending number talks into money, time, fractions, decimals, estimation, and patterns. Many of these ideas are picked up in the mini-lesson books found in Cathy Fosnot’s Context for Learning series.

Here are a few additional ideas:

Decompose a while number
The number 10 is composed of _____? (5 and 5, 2 and 8, 2 and 2 and 6,…)

Decompose a fraction
The number 7 ninth is composed of _____? (2 ninths and 5 ninths, 2 thirds and 1 ninth,….)

Decompose money
I have 45 cents. What coins might I have? (4 dimes and 5 pennies, 1 quarter and 4 nickels, ….)

Decompose time
At went to the park to play for 45 minutes. What did I do and how long did each thing take? (slide for 10 minutes, soccer for 30 minutes, and swings for 5 minutes)

Decompose a number with a decimal
The number 2.45 is composed of ______? (2 and .45, 1.45 and 1, four halves and .45)

Making change – Subtraction with money
If a spent $17.45 on ice cream for my family, what might my change be?
(If paid with $20 change would be $2.55, if paid with $18.00 change would be $0.55, if paid with $17.50 change would be $0.05,….)
OR I spent $17.45 on ice cream and paid with a $20 bill. What might my change be? (2 dollar bills, two quarters, and a nickel, or 10 quarters and a nickel,…)

Adding or subtracting fractions
1/3 + 1/2 + 1/8 + 1/4 + 1/8 =

Adding or subtracting time
School started at 8:30 and ended at 2:45. How long were you at school?

There are so many more places to talk number talks. Please share other ideas.

One of the most common questions I receive when I am working with a group of elementary math teachers is, “what does homework look like with this new way of teaching math?” To elaborate a bit more, when during class time, students are working on number talks and problem solving done with a group of students, how do we take that collaborative learning home?

Here are a few suggestions that are influenced by Lydia Song who put on a great workshop on extending and connecting number talks and problem solving.

Number Talk – Have the students do a number talk for homework with the directions, “solve the problem in two different ways. Show your thinking.” Below the two columns, have students explain one of their strategies and why it is an efficient way to solve the problem.
One of These Things – Students are given 4 numbers, pictures, or equations and need to explain why one of them is not like the others. The ultimate objective is for students to be able to provide mathematical reasoning for why each one of the 4 is different than the others.
Same, Same, Different – Copy 2 samples of student work from a number talk or problem solving side by side. Students then write about how the strategies are the same and how they are different.
Make it Easy- What number would you put in this equation to make it easier to solve? 39 + _____ + 46 = You can put any number in the blank. The key is to explain why did you select that number and why did that number make the problem easier to solve. “I would add a 1 to this problem because 39 and 1 makes 40 and 40 plus 46 is an easy problem to solve. 86” You can have the students answer each one of these in two different ways. “Another way is to add 5. I would add 5 because 4 goes to 46 to make 50 and 1 goes to 39 to make 40. 40+50= 90.” Or “I added 61 because 61 and 39 is 100 so 100+46=146.”
Which Strategy is More Efficient – This is set up the same as Same, Same, Different above with two student strategies put sided by side. The prompt is for students to analyze the work to determine which strategy is more efficient and why.

KEY CONSIDERATIONS
Homework gives parents a glimpse of what math looks like in the classroom. What message do you want to send parents? What message does a page of similar math problems on a worksheet send parents? Parents want to know what is happening at school so regular homework is important.

If students can’t do it at school, they can’t do it at home. If you have students solve 432 ÷ 12 = in at least two different ways for homework, be sure they have a variety of different strategies for solving similar problems in class first.

This is new to teachers, new to parents, and new to students. Be sure students have done similar assignments in class before they become homework. If a child goes home and says, “ I don’t understand what to do”, it often leaves parents with a negative perception of shifts in math education. With this in mind, I like the above homework ideas because they can become routine and problems and strategies can easily be swapped out to match the weekly content.

All of the above incorporate the standards of mathematical practice while building conceptual understanding and fluency.

This opinion, published on September 15 in USA Today sums up many of the key strengths of common core mathematics and clearly identifies what the standards are and what they are not.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/09/15/common-core-math-education-standards-fluency-column/15693531/