Education Week - November 12, 2014 - Special Report - S10

S10 |
EDUCATION WEEK n
November 12, 2014
Making Sense of the Math: The Common Core in Practice > www.edweek.org/go/math-report
Teachers Band Together
To Build Math 'Coherence'
Common core's progressions guide training
By Liana Heitin
I
n early September, math teachers from across Kent County,
Md., gathered for their first professional learning community
meetings of the school year. Kris Hemstetter, a math and English/language
arts coach for the 2,200-student district, was
working with a small group of 3rd through 5th grade teachers
and urged them to keep in mind "where our kids are, and
where they're going."
Ms. Hemstetter was referring to a shift in the Common Core
State Standards for mathematics known as "coherence," the idea
that math concepts should be linked both within and across
grade levels. Unlike many previous state standards, the common
core puts a heavy emphasis on coherent instruction, and
consequently, many districts are finding ways to familiarize
teachers with standards other than the ones they teach.
For the second year in a row, the elementary teachers in Ms. Hemstetter's
district are meeting monthly in cross-grade sessions after
school, rather than in the grade-level silos previously used, to go over
math concepts and instructional methods. For Ms. Hemstetter, the
goal is to get teachers talking about how skills build on each other.
Many experts say organizing these kinds of cross-grade-level
professional learning experiences is one of the best ways to
encourage coherent instruction. While teachers can study the
"progressions documents" associated with the standards, which
outline student-learning sequences for particular math topics,
those texts can be tough to penetrate without support. Intergrade
professional learning, though logistically difficult, gives
educators a chance to teach each other about the complicated
learning progressions inherent in the standards, they say.
Math naturally lends itself to fluid instruction, according to Phil
Daro, a senior fellow at America's Choice, a Washington-based
school improvement consulting group owned by Pearson Inc., and a
Elementary teachers in Kent
County, Md., examine
progressions documents
associated with the common
core during a districtwide
cross-grade training.
lead writer of the common standards for math. But state academic
standards have tended not to make fluidity a focus until now.
"Traditionally in the U.S., we taught one arithmetic for whole
numbers and taught a second and different arithmetic for fractions,
and then we taught a third arithmetic for expressions
with letters in them," he said. "Whereas mathematically, you
could do it all with one arithmetic." Other countries, including
Singapore and Japan, have done a better job of teaching students
to apply the same principles to many different types of
problems, Mr. Daro said.
Photo by
Swikar Patel
Coherence is named in the common standards, along with "rigor"
and "focus," as one of the three major mathematical "shifts" from
previous state standards. "Mathematics is not a list of disconnected
topics, tricks, or mnemonics; it is a coherent body of knowledge
made up of interconnected concepts," the standards document says.
"Therefore, the standards are designed around coherent progressions
from grade to grade."
Dense Documents
The standards ask students to "apply and extend previous understandings"
when learning new skills-an indirect reference to
cross-grade coherence. For instance, students are expected to use
what they learned about multiplication in 3rd grade to multiply
fractions by whole numbers in 5th grade, and then again when
dividing fractions by fractions in 6th grade.
"As a teacher, what it means is you really should be familiar
with the whole program, not just the part of the program where
you add on new knowledge," said Mr. Daro.
While many math teachers have long sought to ensure their
instruction is consistent with what's taught in other grades, the
common core has made that objective more explicit, while seeking
to make the connections more readily apparent.
The common standards for math were developed out of a series of
http://www.edweek.org/go/math-report
Education Week - November 12, 2014 - Special Report

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