Students, even as young as kindergarten, are natural problem solvers (Carpenter et al., 2017). Even before they learn to count, they can make sense of mathematical problems and real- world situations (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2022). Kindergartners can make sense of complex story problems, including Separate Start Unknown…

A one-degree angle would certainly be difficult to draw accurately, especially without the aid of other tools like a protractor. However, mentally making a one-degree angle in visualized imagination is not only possible, but it is important for students' emergent understandings of angular measure. When students begin learning about length,…

Every educator knows the sinking feeling of a lesson gone wrong. As teachers look around the room and realize that many of their students are just not getting it, they often feel like failures. However, the struggle students experience as they persevere through high-quality challenging tasks is not a sign of failure, but rather a key aspect of…

Even before the release of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM)'s Principles to Actions (2014), teachers paid significant attention to mathematics tasks based on their positive influence on student learning (Doyle, 1988; Kazemi, 1998; NCTM, 1989, 2000). Over the last almost quarter century, we have learned a lot about high-level…

Let's say you are a Grades 3-5 teacher in search of an activity sheet on different fraction notations. A search in May 2022 on the popular resources sharing site TeachersPayTeachers (TpT) yielded 2,832 results, 105 of which were free. With so many options, how would you go about choosing a resource for your students? What would factor into your…

Providing students the autonomy and choice to learn when productive struggle becomes unproductive is a core teaching belief in the author's classroom. The author teaches in a multiage classroom where he has 16 first- and second-grade students, ages 6, 7, and 8. Like other educators, he believes in the importance of productive struggle. The author…

Black students in today's classrooms face major challenges unknown to white teachers. In this article, the authors share instructional practices, mindsets, and reflective questions that teachers can implement, practice, and respond to in order to support Black students to feel safe and welcome in their mathematics classrooms. In doing so, the…

Generalizing patterns is an important feature of algebraic reasoning that is accessible to students across grade-levels because it connects their numerical reasoning to algebraic reasoning. In this article, the authors describe how teachers can use the game Crack the Code to introduce generalizing to their students or can extend students'…

Probabilistic reasoning underpins much of middle school students' future work in data analysis and inferential statistics. Unfortunately for many middle school students, probabilistic reasoning is not intuitive. One specific area in which students seem to struggle is determining the probability of compound events (Moritz and Watson 2000). Research…

We share ideas for preparing for and enacting high-cognitive demand tasks in ways that support students in articulating and justifying their ideas. We offer strategies for developing and posing several types of purposeful questions: (1) eliciting thinking, (2) generating ideas, (3) clarifying explanations, and (4) justifying claims.

The authors who are mathematics teacher educators, have found that classifying, composing, and transforming shapes (in particular, rotations and reflections) are areas of difficulty for adults as well as for children. However, these are also some of the most important geometric ideas. They are fundamental topics in the K-8 Geometry and Measurement…