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.
Trena L. Wilkerson
How has NCTM leadership shaped the evolution of teaching and learning mathematics? What are your expectations for NCTM leadership?
The Asked & Answered department shares excerpts from discussion threads on the online MyNCTM community. In this issue, featured threads highlight responses to members' questions related to mathematical depth in preschool, spiral review in the upper elementary grades, ideas for differentiation in middle school, and projects for high school algebra.
Christopher Harrow and Ms. Nurfatimah Merchant
Transferring fundamental concepts across contexts is difficult, even when deep similarities exist. This article leverages Desmos-enhanced visualizations to unify conceptual understanding of the behavior of sinusoidal function graphs through envelope curve analogies across Cartesian and polar coordinate systems.
Erell Germia and Nicole Panorkou
We present a Scratch task we designed and implemented for teaching and learning coordinates in a dynamic and engaging way. We use the 5Es framework to describe the students' interactions with the task and offer suggestions of how other teachers may adopt it to successfully implement Scratch tasks.
Dan D. Meyer
Students use computers outside and inside of math classes and they enjoy them immeasurably more outside of math class. That's because, outside of class, they use their computers in ways that are creative and social. The same can and must be true about computers inside of math class.
The Asked & Answered department shares excerpts from discussion threads on the online MyNCTM community. In this issue, featured threads highlight responses to members' questions regarding 1st grade number sense, multiplication and division of fractions, issues of definition and precision related to circles, and the value of rationalizing denominators.
Debasmita Basu, Nicole Panorkou, Michelle Zhu, Pankaj Lal, and Bharath K. Samanthula
We provide an example from our integrated math and science curriculum where students explore the mathematical relationships underlying various science phenomena. We present the tasks we designed for exploring the covariation relationships that underlie the concept of gravity and discuss the generalizations students made as they interacted with those tasks.
