Month: March 2011

Workshop on Standards for Mathematical Practice

/ Al Cuoco / Leave a comment

Included in the Common Core are eight standards for “mathematical practice”
that describe habits of mind employed by proficient users of mathematics.
Understanding and implementing the mathematical practices will be key to the
impact of the CCSS. The Implementing the Common Core Standards Workshop will
provide an introduction to the Common Core Standards for Mathematical
Practice, with an emphasis on algebra. Specifically, we will examine
standards MP2 (reason abstractly and quantitatively), MP7 (look for and
make use of structure), and MP8 (look for and express regularity in repeated
reasoning), with examples of how these practices can bring coherence to
seemingly disconnected standard topics in elementary, middle and high school
mathematics.

More information is available online at:
http://www2.edc.org/CME/mpi/workshop.html

Another professional development project

/ Bill McCallum / Leave a comment

In addition to the efforts mentioned here and here, COMAP is holding a three-day invitational conference in Washington, DC from April 29–May 1, funded by the National Science Foundation.  According to the PI Sol Garfunkel,  this working meeting will bring together about 70 representatives from mathematics education practitioner organizations, the two assessment consortia, state and national education policy groups, and major instructional materials development teams. The purpose is to build a productive dialogue between the key players in implementation of the Common Core State Standards. The conference will draw on the expertise of mathematics educators with responsibilities close to the everyday work of schools and specialists in curriculum materials development in order to inform the development of high quality assessments.

Update on Illustrative Mathematics

/ Bill McCallum / Leave a comment

Illustrative Mathematics had its advisory board meeting a couple of weeks ago at the Institute for Mathematics & Education at the University of Arizona. The board includes representatives from the national mathematics and teacher organizations, from state departments of education, and from the two federally funded assessment consortia. The board developed a protocol for reviewing tasks and problems, and we are now gearing up to process the first batch of illustrative tasks. We hope to have a prototype website displaying the standards in a flexible way online in a couple of weeks.

Another project for professional development on the Standards

/ Bill McCallum / 2 Comments

In addition to the workshop I mentioned here, a new NSF funded-project will be developing recommendations for professional development. In the words of the PIs, Karen Marrongelle, Peg Smith, and Paola Sztajn:

“Articulating Research Ideas that Support the Implementation of the Professional Development Needed for Making the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics Reality for K-12 Teachers is a newly funded NSF project that will coordinate knowledge from different fields to develop recommendations for the design, implementation, and assessment of large scale professional development systems consistent with the mathematics of the CCSS. Research results from diverse perspectives (e.g, mathematics education, organizational theory, professional development) will be articulated into a coherent framework and a set of recommendations for successful large-scale, system-level implementation of mathematics professional development initiatives. The recommendations will be disseminated through the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Additionally, the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, the Mathematical Association of America, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics, and the Association of State Supervisors of Mathematics are partners in this effort.”

Structuring the mathematical practices

/ Bill McCallum / 1 Comment

In the progressions project we’ve been discussing how best to represent the standards for mathematical practice. The practices are signposted throughout the documents, but we’ve also been thinking about how to provide some structure for the practice standards that will help people avoid fruitless tagging exercises in their efforts to integrate the practice standards into the content standards. If you think about it long enough you can associate just about any practice standard with any content standard, but this sort of matrix thinking can lead to a dilution of the force of the practice standards—if you try to do everything all the time, you end up doing nothing. This diagram is an attempt to provide some higher order structure to the practice standards, just as the clusters and domains provide higher order structure to the content standards.