This book argues that even in today's high-stakes testing environment, 'teaching to the test' need not be teachersa (TM) only focus as they introduce young children to mathematics. Judith McVarish demonstrates how building a community of learners and using problem solving to engage students can help teachers encourage studentsa (TM) disposition to creative thinking and reasoninga "skills that can otherwise become lost due to the pressure of the many other expectations placed upon both teachers and students. This book offers strategies for infusing mathematics learning and reasoning into elementary school classrooms while meeting curriculum and testing mandates. The teacher researcher component of each chapter provides a vehicle for teachers to bring their own expertise and questions back into the teaching and learning equation.

This book argues that even in today's high-stakes testing environment, 'teaching to the test' need not be teachersa (TM) only focus as they introduce young children to mathematics. Judith McVarish demonstrates how building a community of learners and using problem solving to engage students can help teachers encourage studentsa (TM) disposition to creative thinking and reasoninga "skills that can otherwise become lost due to the pressure of the many other expectations placed upon both teachers and students. This book offers strategies for infusing mathematics learning and reasoning into elementary school classrooms while meeting curriculum and testing mandates. The teacher researcher component of each chapter provides a vehicle for teachers to bring their own expertise and questions back into the teaching and learning equation.

This edited book provides readers with a guide for implementing self-assessment and self-evaluation that is based on a model implemented successfully in a diverse range of teacher education courses. Educators from disciplines as diverse as theater arts, early childhood, psychology, mathematics, and science education have adopted a model of self-assessment and self-evaluation that supports the individual ongoing assessment of learning throughout a course as well as the final synthesis of individual learning in the course. Self-assessment and self-evaluation are presented here as a means to help students and teachers reinvent the learning process as co-constructed, powered by evidence and agency in order to lift thinking beyond the mere attainment of an end-point grade; to help students own their learning in new ways they may not have experienced before; to think about teaching and learning that will carry them beyond their formal schooling years; and to value new questions as evidence of learning.