Supporting a
Preferred Vision for a
Comprehensive Math Curriculum
1. As you reflect on your teacher-directed lessons, you may want to consider each of the following:
What specific skills are you currently teaching?
How are these skills reflected in the EALRs and on the Math Continuum?
What resources are you using to teach these skills?
What observations are you making about your students’ performance from reviewing their work?
In what ways are the students self-reflecting?
What do you envision as your next steps?
2. As you think about your work with cooperative problem-solving opportunities, you may want to consider each of the following:
How often are students engaged in problem-solving tasks?
What specific kinds of strategies do you see your students using?
What scoring criteria are you using?
How are you engaging your students in self-reflection?
Share with me a class set of problem-solving tasks that you scored recently.
Based on your observations, what are you discovering about your students’ ability to problem solve?
3. As you reflect on the work you are doing related to reasoning, you may want to consider each of the following:
How do you see reasoning related to problem solving?
What examples can you share with me of students verifying results or checking for reasonableness of results?
4. Think about how you are teaching students to communicate about mathematics and consider the following:
What opportunities have your students had to communicate about math?
What specific teaching strategies have benefited your students’ learning?
What progress do you see your students making?
What resources are you using to give students practice in communicating understanding in math?
How are you involving the students in self-reflection regarding their math communication?
5. Regarding your work with math connections, consider the following:
What opportunities have your students had to relate concepts within math?
What examples can you describe of students relating math to other subjects/disciplines?
In what ways are students relating math to everyday life?
What resources are you using to help students make these connections?
6. Think about the work you are doing in teaching the concepts and procedures of math and consider the following:
What content strand(s) (number sense, measurement, geometry, probability and statistics, algebra) are you teaching currently?
What resources are you using to teach these concepts and procedures?
What observations are you making about your students’ performance?
How are your students engaged in self-reflection?
7. As you reflect on your use of district core resources, consider the following:
Describe a math lesson from your basic text that you taught recently. What math essential learnings were you addressing?
How successful were your students in meeting your objectives for this lesson? How did you assess their progress?
In what ways were you able to make modifications to meet the needs of at-risk students? Did you provide enrichment or extensions for high achievers?
How does this lesson fit into the broader context. What has come before and what will you teach next?
How are you using the various components that accompany the program? What skills are these components addressing?
How are you using The Problem Solver (1-8), NCS Mentor (4, 7, 10), or Exemplars (1-10)? How did you and/or your students assess the work? What techniques or ideas do you teach to help your students explain their thinking?
How would you describe your students’ overall ability to solve problems and communicate about their thinking? What are your plans for future lessons? How are you making these decisions?
8. How is your math program supporting the students in acquiring the district outcomes? Thinking Behaviors? Thinking Skills?