Math Practices and the Common Core Webinar

Here is a link to a free webinar on July 26 at 2:00 p.m.

This is the description. It looks very interesting. If you participate please share what you learned.

This event takes place on Thursday, July 26, 2012, 2 to 3 p.m. ET.

As states and districts work to implement the Common Core State Standards in math, a key challenge is helping students not only acquire content knowledge but also become proficient in the set of eight mathematical practices laid out in the document. The practices represent different types of expertise students should develop in using math, from making sense of problems to reasoning abstractly and constructing viable arguments.
This Education Week webinar—featuring a lead writer of the common core for math and a district math supervisor—will examine what the standards for mathematical practice mean, where they came from, and how they can be effectively embedded in the classroom. How will the practices change instruction? What kind of support do teachers need to bring them to life? What resources are available to help educators? Those and other questions will be explored in this webinar, which will provide both a greater understanding of the practices and practical, hands-on advice.

Presenters:
Jason Zimba, co-founder, Student Achievement Partners and a lead writer of the common standards in mathematics
Marlene Lovanio, math supervisor, Bristol school district, Conn.

Moderator:
Erik Robelen, assistant editor, Education Week

Tags: common_core, eight_mathematical_practices, math_practices, webinar

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Permalink Reply by Claudia Heinrich on July 26, 2012 at 8:53pm

I found this webinar to be interesting and helpful.

One of the biggest challenges I think for me will be learning how to make new ways to ask questions in the classroom work. I think this is a very big change from traditional methods of teaching where we guide the students to all come up with the same correct answer. One of the examples that was given was a problem dealing with patterns and Mathematical Practice 8: Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning. The problem was looking at patterns and the point was made that patterns are a tool, not a topic. Learning how to guide students to answer questions with, "When I ......, then I ..... " Rather than this is the correct answer.

Another point made was standards do not just ask in a general way to reason, they ask to reason about a specific task

Which is closer to 1? 4/5 or 5/4. Just giving the answer is not enough, students must explain their reasoning.

Marlen Lovanio had a nice presentation on how the Bristol school district is working to implement the new standards. She shared two resources that the teachers developed; A Universal Tools Teacher Guide for teachers to use to record how the students are using the Mathematical Practices and a Universal Tools Poster that illustrates the 8 Practices. She said the high school teachers has a poster contest and chose the one she shared as the winner.

I took screen shots and am posting them below.

Overall I thought that the webinar was worth an hour of my time. If you did not get to participate I would recommend that you follow the link and look at the archived slideshow.

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Permalink Reply by Judy Wheeler on August 3, 2012 at 4:04pm

The direct link to the archived webinar and its accompanying power point slides is:

http://www.edweek.org/ew/marketplace/webinars/webinars.html#archived

Thank you, Claudia, for bringing this webinar to our attention. I, too, found it very worthwhile. The main part of the webinar is only 30 minutes, though the last 30 minutes devoted to Q&A added some new insights. In focusing on the MP Standards, Bristol chose just three of the 8 to implement in the coming year: Problem Solving, Constructing Arguments, and Modeling. That seemed very reasonable and not quite so overwhelming. I particularly liked the task examples that were shared. Even the ones for elementary students could easily be extended to challenge middle school and algebra 1 high school students. For example: Describe what you notice and formulate a general statement in the following pairs of addition problems: 5+6=?, 5+7=?; 3+5=?. 4+5=?; 7+7=?, 8+7=?. Besides stating it verbally (when you increase one of the addends by one, the entire sum increases by one), later grades can represent this symbolically ( a+(b+1)=(a+b)+1 as well as (a+1)+b=a+(1+b)=a+(b+1)=(a+b)+1) and discuss why this is so because of the associative and commutative properties.

Here's another problem: Show how any rectangle of size a" x b" can be cut up and fit into a square with the same perimeter. Here's a high school task direct from Smarter Balance that was shared: a circle has its center at (6,7) and passes through the point (1,4); give the coordinates of the center of a circle that is tangent the first at (1,4) and has half the area; show your work or explain how you got your answer.

I found this list of strategies to promote the mathematical practices helpful:

shift the locus of mathematical control
develop perseverence
increase opportunities for communication
ask higher-order questions
attend to vocabulary
make connections within and across mathematics