New Alaska State Standards for Math: Connecting Content with Classroom Practices

1. New Alaska State Standards for Math: • Connecting Content with Classroom Practices ASDN Webinar Series Spring 2013 Session One February 27, 2013

2. Today’s Targets • Discuss an overview of the eight mathematical practices that accompany the New Alaska Standards. • Identify key implications for classroom instruction. • Dig deeper into the first two practices. • .

3. Previous Training Poll What learning opportunities have you participated in relating to the New Alaska Standards or Common Core? Webinars Face to Face Training with EED Staff Readings/Articles This is my First Experience

4. Ted Talk- Dan Meyer

5. Positive Impact • “The common core standards effort can not bring about positive, meaningful change for students unless we translate the standards from words on a page to tangible improvements in learning and teaching.” • ASCD Executive Director, Gene Carter (2010) • .

6. Organization • Integration of practices and content. • Built on progressions of learning. • Organized by domains and strands. • Focused through anchors and clusters. • Specified by grade level.

7. Fewer, Higher, Clearer “The math standards mark a significant departure from most previous standards in a number of ways. The authors of the standards adopted the motto ‘Fewer, clearer, higher’ to guide their work.” King and Jones (2011)

8. Criteria for Success • Rigorous • Coherent • Teachable and learnable • Measurable • Evidence-based

9. New Alaska State Standards

10. Eight Mathematical Practices- An Overview Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. Reason abstractly and quantitatively. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others. Model with mathematics. Use appropriate tools strategically. Attend to precision. Look for and make use of structure. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

11. Practices Continuum

12. Helping Students to Demonstrate What They “Understand” Connecting Mathematical Practice and Mathematical Content The Standards for Mathematical Practice describe ways in which developing student practitioners within the discipline of mathematics increasingly ought to engage with the subject matter as they grow in mathematical maturity and expertise throughout the elementary, middle and high school years. Designers of curricula, assessments, and professional development should attend to the need to connect the mathematical practices to mathematical content in mathematics instruction. The standards for Mathematical Content are a balanced combination of procedure and understanding. Expectations that begin with the word “understand” are often especially good opportunities to connect the practices to the content. Students who lack understanding of a topic may rely on procedures too heavily. Those students might be less likely to represent problems coherently, justify conclusions, and apply the mathematics to practical situations. Alaska EED (2012)

13. Thoughts? What is the first word that comes to mind when you read this paragraph taken from the EED Website?

14. Practice Number One Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.

15. Examples for Practice One A middle childhood teacher (Grades 3,4,5) might post a set of different approaches to a solution, asking students to identify “what this mathematician was thinking or trying out” and evaluating the success of the strategy. An early adolescence teacher (Grades 6,7,8) might have students articulate a specific way of laying out the terrain of a problem and evaluating different starting points for solving it.

16. What Does Practice One Look Like?Exploring Math Practices- Perseverance

17. Poll- How about your students? Have you experienced the lack of perseverance in your students, or even your own children when it comes to solving and applying math problems? Yes No Occasionally

18. Practice Two Reason Abstractly and Quantitatively

19. Examples for Practice Two Teachers who are developing students’ capacity to "reason abstractly and quantitatively" help their learners understand the relationships between problem scenarios and mathematical representation, as well as how the symbols represent strategies for solution. A teacher might ask her students to reflect on what each number in a fraction represents as parts of a whole. A different teacher might ask his students to discuss different sample operational strategies for a patterning problem, evaluating which is the most efficient and accurate means of finding a solution.

20. What would the conversation sound like?

21. What Feedback Would You Give? If this was a student you were working with, how would you move their learning forward and close the gap in their understanding? (on another note, what is the benefit of having students show their work when they solve a multiple choice item?)

23. A Trade- 15 minutes today for 15 minutes over the next week!

24. Be well, Do good work and keep in touch.