Capturing students' own observations before solving a problem propelled a culture of sense making by meeting needs typical of middle school learners.
Laurie Speranzo and Erik Tillema
Specific teacher moves and lesson planning can facilitate student empowerment in the middle school classroom.
Emily Dardis and Megan H. Wickstrom
Modifications to a first- and second-grade STEAM activity, Elephant Toothpaste, highlight ways to emphasize mathematical thinking by running multiple experiments, posing mathematical questions, and having students make both qualitative and quantitative observations. Contributors to the iSTEM department share ideas and activities that stimulate student interest in the integrated fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in K–grade 5 classrooms.
Clayton M. Edwards, Rebecca R. Robichaux-Davis, and Brian E. Townsend
Three inquiry-based tasks highlight the planning, classroom discourse, positive results, and growth in one class's journey.
Ron Lancaster
Since its inception, the Mathematical Lens column has provided teachers with resources to use with their students to make connections between mathematics and the world around us through the use of photographs. The editors and the dozens of teachers who submitted material for columns have taken all of us on a journey around the world to discover where mathematics lives. These columns have offered teachers a license to do mathematics everywhere and to travel far with their students with a full tank of resources.
Stephen Phelps
Edited by Anna F. DeJarnette
A monthly set of problems targets a variety of ability levels.
Imani M. Goffney
Edited by Naima F. Goffney
My name is Naima Goffney, and I am an eleven-year-old seventh grader at Julius West Middle School. I am taking algebra 1 this year. I wanted to write the Math for Real because in math class I do not always think that what we are learning is related to the real world. At home, my mom shows me all the different ways I am mathematically smart, which makes me want to try harder in school during the “rougher” days. We can use math to know more about how to improve our skills and find the math we learn in school more interesting and more related to our real world as middle schoolers.
Daniel J. Heck, Jill V. Hamm, Jessica A. Dula, Pippa Hoover, and Abigail S. Hoffman
Three seventh graders, working as a small group in their math class, had a conversation about adding and subtracting integers. The students discussed the challenges they faced in the assigned task.
