By Meredith Dadigan Abel, K-5 IM Certified Facilitator When teachers and students come back from spring break, spring fever is in the air, and classroom routines may falter. While teachers have spent the entire year setting...
By Max Ray-Riek, Senior Director, Teacher Professional Learning Our vision at IM is a world where all students know, use, and enjoy mathematics. Educators in our IM Community work toward this vision in classrooms day after...
By Cherelle McKnight, Director, PK-5 Content Development At one of my former schools, students who passed out birthday party invitations had to invite their entire class. While I disagreed with how the policy was...
By Brea Jimenez, Specialist, Facilitator Certification and Quality Assurance and April Mouton, Senior Director, Access, Content & Equity IM believes in a world where all learners know, use, and enjoy mathematics. We...
A Look Back and a Look Ahead By Bill McCallum, IM Co-Founder and CEO Hello there, and welcome to 2024! I hope that you have had time to relax and recharge in preparation for all of the excitement that this year will bring....
In her interview with Yitzi Weiner for Authority Magazine, Odalis Amparo (Illustrative Mathematics’ Professional Learning Specialist) emphasizes the significance of culturally responsive and equitable mathematics education....
By Greta Anderson, CEO of Greta Anderson Consulting, LLC and IM Certified Facilitator There’s a common misconception that has surfaced on a checkpoint, but no additional minutes or days to reteach. How will this impact...
Anita Crowder, Director of Impact at Illustrative Mathematics, reimagines math education by emphasizing the importance of students' own experiences and existing knowledge. She challenges the traditional view of students as...
By April Mouton, Senior Director, Access, Content & Equity and Brea Jimenez, Specialist, Facilitator Certification and Quality Assurance The Gradual Release of Responsibility approach to learning mathematics—I do, we...
By William McCallum, IM CEO You asked, we listened, and now, we are preparing to deliver! I am excited to tell you today about our new curriculum, IM 360, which was developed based on your thoughtful feedback. IM 360 is the...
By Adrienne Baytops Paul, Math Specialist, UnboundEd, COO of My Mathematical Mind, and former Middle School Teacher The 14 Practices of Peter Liljedahl’s Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC) complement the Illustrative...
By the IM Team And just like that, school is back in session! Whether you are implementing the IM curriculum for the first time or getting a fresh start as you experience year two or three, the beginning of the year is the...
By Dionne Aminata, IM Senior Director, Strategic Initiatives As a fully remote organization, the IM team gets a lot done working behind the screens. Now, with IM K–12 Math in full swing, many of us are stepping away from...
By the IM Team As summer winds down, we understand that you are not rushing toward the finish line of your summer break. Hopefully, there have been many lazy days, trips or adventures, and time spent with family and...
By Eric Partridge, IM Certified® Facilitator I don’t have many memories from elementary school. The one memory I have from elementary math is from playing Around the World. The object of this game was to answer a...
By William McCallum, IM CEO Here at IM we are excited by and proud of the reception IM K–12 Math™ is getting. As more and more districts adopt it, we are thinking about how to support them. What are the next steps? Our...
By Meredith Dadigan Abel, IM Certified® Facilitator It is magical to be in a classroom with a strong math community. In this classroom, the brilliance of all students prevails. Students and teachers share a unanimous belief...
2022 was a remarkable year of growth and achievement at IM. Our employees are energetic, inspired, and committed to our vision of a world where all learners know, use, and enjoy mathematics. I couldn't be more proud of what...
By Sara Baranauskas, IM Lead Curriculum Writer, Grade 1 and IM Certified® Facilitator Counting Collections is an engaging and playful mathematical routine that supports and builds students’ sense of mathematical identity...
Dionne Aminata, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives, Marketing, Illustrative Mathematics Rolanda Baldwin, Vice President of Mathematics, UnboundEd Illustrative Mathematics and UnboundEd both agree that achieving racial...
Members of the Illustrative Mathematics team recently attended two national conferences for math educators: NCSM (Sept 26–28, 2022) in Anaheim, CA, and NCTM (Sept 28–Oct 1, 2022) in Los Angeles. We enjoyed meeting so many...
By Maureen D. O’Connell “How is it going with your implementation of IM K–5 Math Centers?” That’s my favorite question to ask during professional learning for IM K–5 Math. The response is a pedagogical temperature check...
By Mike Henderson As a former grade 3 teacher, I know first hand how daunting teaching math at this level can be. On top of developing fluency with addition and subtraction within 1,000, students need to learn about new...
By Mike Henderson Teaching addition and subtraction in grade 2 is a challenging balancing act. As students move from numbers within 100 to numbers within 1,000, they need to use approaches that involve directly representing...
By William McCallum Last week, we had our first large-scale in-person event in quite a while, a training for new and returning facilitators in Baltimore, with over 110 facilitators and 13 employees attending. I gave a...
By Liza Bondurant, IM Certified® Facilitator/Associate Professor Do you spend hours hunting down materials for your lesson plans? How can you be sure the materials are aligned to your standards? How can you make your lesson...
By Dr. Kristen Taylor, IM Certified® Facilitator Math teachers can talk all day about math! We get super excited when we encounter someone else who enjoys these conversations as well. But too many of our students don't get...
With the surge of the Omicron variant, many schools are moving back to distance learning. Although we may not be excited to leave our classrooms again, we are better prepared for distance learning this time around. Most, if...
By William McCallum A few weeks ago, my wife and I took a 17-day rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. We descended through the layers of rock, from the 270 million year old Kaibab sedimentary layer of chert, dolomite,...
By Alex Clayton When was the last time you stepped into an entirely new environment? You weren’t sure exactly what was going to happen. There was no one you recognized. How did you feel: Uncertain? Anxious? Hopeful? During...
2021 marks our 10th anniversary at Illustrative Mathematics, and we couldn’t be more proud to have impacted so many hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, and families since our humble beginnings in 2011. Our business...
By William McCallum and Kristin Umland "Math literacy will be a liberation tool for people trying to get out of poverty and the best hope for people trying not to get left behind.” —Bob Moses, 1935–2021 Bob Moses, the civil...
By Maureen D. O’Connell, IM K–5 Math™ Pilot Teacher,IM Certified® Facilitator for IM K–5 Math “The more intensely interested a teacher is in a student’s thinking, the more interested the student becomes in his or her own...
By IM Certified Facilitators, Cheryl Fricchione and Rachel Rundstrom Consider this:A child whose primary language isn’t English does not participate in the classroom to the degree that their English-speaking peers do....
By Elisabeth O’Bryon, co-founder and Chief Impact Officer at Family Engagement Lab and Megan Lorio, Managing Editor at Family Engagement Lab Engaging families in meaningful and equitable ways is a cornerstone of student...
By Maureen D. O’Connell, Math Specialist Some math tools and representations help students solve in-the-moment problems. Other math tools and representations help students solve problems and grow their conceptual...
By Jen Hawkins, IM Facilitator and IM K-5 Product Specialist Illustrative Mathematics believes that students can achieve success as mathematical thinkers by working through problems and consolidating their learning through...
by Liz Ramirez, Director of Implementation “This makes the expectations for what I need to change visible.” “It’s not about the tool. It’s about the conversation using the tool.” Quotes from leaders who participated in IM’s...
By Michael Ramirez, Senior Coordinator of School Transformation, Elementary Math When I began school as a kindergartener, I absolutely adored math. As a lower elementary school student, I remember relatives asking me what...
By William McCallum On March 20, 2015, I received the following email: Thank you for submitting your proposals to the K–12 OER Collaborative. We are pleased to advise you that Illustrative Mathematics has been selected as a...
By Asya Howlette, Director of Mathematics and Science at Thurgood Marshall Raise your hand if you have been perplexed by professional learning that told you your class needs to be culturally responsive, but left you...
By Dionne Aminata, Grade 2–5 Lead Writer and Sarah Caban, Grade 5 Lead Writer“Some students are never given the opportunity to engage with mathematics in rich and meaningful ways that emphasize critical thinking and problem...
By Dionne Aminata, Grade 2–5 Lead Writer and Sarah Caban, Grade 5 Lead Writer “The idea of being a ‘math person’ is based on two pervasive world views; first, the so-called ‘fixed’ mindset, that what one knows about math...
By Dionne Aminata, Grade 2–5 Lead Writer and Sarah Caban, Grade 5 Lead Writer"We have to break from the notion that learning mathematics must be a linear and procedural endeavor mastered through rote practice and...
By Dionne Aminata, Grade 2–5 Lead Writer and Sarah Caban, Grade 5 Lead WriterWhen do students practice their math facts? How is math fluency assessed?”—current and prospective IM K-5 Math™ teachers everywhere We appreciate...
By William McCallum I'm not a very good skier, but I have once or twice in my life experienced the joy of a perfect run: gliding down the slopes, taking each turn with confidence. And I've had terrible runs where I...
By Becca Phillips You can’t tell a child “there’s no such thing as monsters” because, well, then, why is there a word for it? I was given this advice when my own daughter was an infant, but I’ve thought a lot about it over...
By Maureen D. O'Connell “Slow down, you’re moving too fast, you got to make the morning last...” When we consider early childhood mathematics this familiar song comes to mind. In our hurried society where more is more,...
by Deborah Peart, Grade 2 Lead Many people have an aversion to word problems. They cringe at the mention of them. In elementary classrooms, teachers often report that this is what their students struggle with most. When...
by LaToya Byrd and Jenna Laib School looks different this year. It’s easy to focus on the changes that will need to be made—the new practices, the new routines, the new technologies—but we must first focus on our central...
By Dionne Aminata Before I joined the K–5 curriculum writing team at IM, I was a K–8 regional math content specialist for a public charter organization that largely consisted of Title I schools, or schools receiving federal...
By Kristin Gray, Director of K–5 Curriculum & Professional Learning Curriculum "An excellent mathematics program includes a curriculum that develops important mathematics along coherent learning progressions and...
By Noelle Conforti Preszler and Kristin Gray In the following activity, think about the students in your classroom. How might each respond? What do you notice? What do you wonder? This activity is the drafted warm-up of the...
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