How to make counting count! This influential book inspires preschool and elementary teachers to experience the joys and rewards of using two activities-Choral Counting and Counting Collections-regularly in their classrooms and in their partnerships with families. It paints a vision for how deeply and creatively children can engage with ideas of number and operations and mathematical sense-making through counting. Megan L. Franke, Elham Kazemi, and Angela Chan Turrou have collected the wisdom of mathematics teachers and researchers across the country who explore activities that are at once playful and intentional, simple and sophisticated. For teachers who want to jumpstart student participation and deepen mathematical understanding, this can be your go-to guide. In six clear, engaging chapters, accompanied by an online Choral Counting tool, you will learn: How to facilitate open-ended counting activities to deepen children's number sense How counting activities can produce both social and academic benefits How teachers can engage with families to build on students' mathematical thinking How to facilitate collaborative activities with multiple entry points and multiple ways to be successful Teachers will see that while the activities stay the same, the mathematics deepens over time and students' learning evolves. Let counting be a gateway into your students' mathematical insights. You might be surprised at what you learn!

Not all mathematics discussions are alike. It's one thing to ask students to share how they solved a problem, to get ideas out on the table so that their thinking becomes visible; but knowing what to do with students' ideas where to go with them can be a daunting task. Intentional Talk provides teachers with a framework for planning and facilitating purposeful mathematics discussions that enrich and deepen student learning. According to Elham Kazemi and Allison Hintz, the critical first step is to identify a discussion's goal and then understand how to structure and facilitate the conversation to meet that goal. Through detailed vignettes from both primary and upper elementary classrooms, the authors provide a window into what teachers are thinking as they lead discussions and make important pedagogical and mathematical decisions along the way. Additionally, the authors examine students' roles as both listeners and talkers and, in the process, offer a number of strategies for improving student participation and learning. A collection of planning templates included in the appendix helps teachers apply the right structure to discussions in their own classrooms. Intentional Talk provides the perfect bridge between student engagement and conceptual understanding in mathematical discussions.

The authors in this edited volume reflect on their experiences with culturally relevant pedagogy_as students, as teachers, as researchers_and how these experiences were often at odds with their backgrounds and/or expectations. Each of the authors speaks to the complexity and difficulty in attempting to address students' cultures, create learning experiences with relevance to their lives and experiences, and enact pedagogies that promote academic achievement while honoring students. At the same time, every author shows the clashes and confrontations that can arise between and among students, teachers, parents, administrators, and educational policies.

The authors in this edited volume reflect on their experiences with culturally relevant pedagogy_as students, as teachers, as researchers_and how these experiences were often at odds with their backgrounds and/or expectations. Each of the authors speaks to the complexity and difficulty in attempting to address students' cultures, create learning experiences with relevance to their lives and experiences, and enact pedagogies that promote academic achievement while honoring students. At the same time, every author shows the clashes and confrontations that can arise between and among students, teachers, parents, administrators, and educational policies.

While mathematicians describe mathematics as playful, beautiful, creative, and captivating, many students describe math class as boring, stressful, useless, and humiliating. In Becoming the Math Teacher You Wish You’d Had, Tracy Zager helps teachers close this gap by making math class more like mathematics. Tracy spent years observing a diverse set of classrooms in which all students had access to meaningful mathematics. She partnered with teachers who helped students internalize the habits of mind of mathematicians as they grappled with age-appropriate content. From these scores of observations, Tracy selected and analyzed the most revealing, fruitful, thought-provoking examples of teaching and learning to share with you in this book. Through these vivid stories, you’ll gain insight into effective instructional decision making. You’ll engage with big concepts and pick up plenty of practical details about how to implement new teaching strategies. All teachers can move toward increasingly authentic, delightful, robust mathematics teaching and learning for themselves and their students. This important book helps us develop instructional techniques that will make the math classes we teach so much better than the math classes we took.