Teachers have the opportunity to make mathematics relevant. We leveraged the popularity of Star Wars to engage students in exploring and connecting two dimensions and three dimensions to careers in toy design.
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Using Mathematics to Design a Droid
George J. Roy, Matthew Cunningham, and Kenneth Rafanan
Building Equitable Math Talk Classrooms
Karen C. Fuson and Steve Leinwand
The power of Number Talks and extensions that can build to an equitable Math Talk Classroom
Challenging but Achievable Math for Young Children
Douglas H. Clements, Shannon S. Guss, and Julie Sarama
Learning trajectories help teachers challenge children at just the right level for their best learning.
Developing Preservice Teachers’ Understanding of Area Through a Units Intervention
Megan H. Wickstrom
Preservice elementary teachers (PSTs) often enter their teacher preparation programs with procedural and underdeveloped understandings of area measurement and its applications. This is problematic given that area and the area model are used throughout K–Grade 12 to develop flexibility in students’ mathematical understanding and to provide them with a visual interpretation of numerical ideas. This study describes an intervention aimed at bolstering PSTs’ understanding of area and area units with respect to measurement and number and operations. Following the intervention, results indicate that PSTs had both an improved ability to solve area tiling tasks as well as increased flexibility in the strategies they implemented. The results indicate that PSTs, similar to elementary students, develop a conceptual understanding of area from the use of tangible tools and are able to leverage visualizations to make sense of multiplicative structure across different strategies.
Facilitating Student-Created Math Walks
Min Wang, Candace Walkington, and Koshi Dhingra
An example of an after-school club activity gives educators some tools and suggestions to implement such an approach in their schools.
Puddle Play!
Deanna Pecaski McLennan
Student Engagement with the “Into Math Graph" Tool
Amanda K. Riske, Catherine E. Cullicott, Amanda Mohammad Mirzaei, Amanda Jansen, and James Middleton
We introduce the Into Math Graph tool, which students use to graph how “into" mathematics they are over time. Using this tool can help teachers foster conversations with students and design experiences that focus on engagement from the student’s perspective.
Walking Away from a Mathematics Problem Is OK
Zachary Champagne
Providing students the autonomy and choice to learn when productive struggle becomes unproductive is a core teaching belief in the author’s classroom. This article tells the story of one student’s ability to know and express when his frustration was too great and how he chose to walk away from his work and return the next day.
Asked & Answered
Each month Asked & Answered highlights selected threads from the MyNCTM community. MyNCTM is an online community where NCTM members can ask questions, start and join discussions, and interact with education experts. We encourage you to join the conversation at https://my.nctm.org.
Conditional Reasoning Online with Mastermind
Sean P. Yee, George J. Roy, and LuAnn Graul
As mathematical patterns become more complex, students' conditional reasoning skills need to be nurtured so that students continue to critique, construct, and persevere in making sense of these complexities. This article describes a mathematical task designed around the online version of the game Mastermind to safely foster conditional reasoning.
