Anita Crowder, PhD, Senior Director of Impact Research An ideal Illustrative Mathematics (IM) classroom is one where students’ curiosity drives learning, their feedback shapes instruction, and their identities are embedded...
Deepa Bharath, District Instructional Lead Teacher, Mathematics at Cambridge Public Schools Sarah Caban, Interim Director, K–5 Teacher Learning at Illustrative Mathematics “Illustrative Mathematics is a problem-based...
Catherine Castillo, Sr. Implementation Specialist Claire Neely, Sr. Implementation Specialist “When teachers reflect on their students’ learning and their practice together, it can demonstrate that teaching challenges are...
Catherine Castillo, Sr. Implementation Specialist Claire Neely, Sr. Implementation Specialist “Given the critical role that school leaders play in supporting the development of coherent instructional systems at the school...
By Tori Cole, Specialist, IM Certified Facilitator Timesha Brooks, Specialist, Math Client Support Engaging Reluctant Math Students Have you encountered students who are reluctant to engage in math? Students who have...
By Claire Neely, Senior Implementation Specialist Illustrative Mathematics’ redesigned IMplementation Reflection Tool (IRT) is a powerful, non-evaluative resource intended to shape the way your school adopts and implements...
By Jen Hawkins, IM Certified® Facilitator and Independent Curriculum Implementation Specialist As I sat at the table in the back of the room, I watched the teacher reveal an image connected to the lesson’s warm-up. She told...
By Dr. Catherine Castillo, Sr. Specialist, Implementation Portfolio Are you leading IM implementation at your school or district and want to ensure an organized and thoughtful rollout? With the upcoming launch of IM® v....
By Dr. Elisabeth O'Bryon, Chief Impact Officer and Co-Founder of Family Engagement Lab and Toka Hussein, K-5 Curriculum Specialist at Illustrative Mathematics Illustrative Mathematics (IM) and Family Engagement Lab (FEL)...
By Brea Jimenez, Specialist, Facilitator Certification and Quality Assurance and April Mouton, Senior Director, Access, Content & Equity Special education is intended to provide bridges between challenges and triumphs...
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....
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 Dr. LaToya Byrd, IM Senior Director, Professional Learning Implementation and Talent The excitement is building. Can you feel it? Conference season is almost here! Math conferences create opportunities for educators to...
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 Lizzy Skousen, 6–12 Curriculum Writer, IM Certified® Facilitator During a problem-based lesson, the teacher does a lot of listening while monitoring student learning. When teachers are introduced to a problem-based...
By Cheryl Fricchione, IMCF and Implementation Development Team Member A quick Google search for “kindergarten math centers” produces over 20 million results: everything from tips to make centers work to theme-based...
By Sonja Twedt, IM Certified® Facilitator, 6–12 Special Projects Course Assistant Are you an instructional coach or teacher leader in a district that is adopting Illustrative Mathematics? If so, you’ve likely found yourself...
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 Catherine Castillo, IM Mathematics Product Specialist In her book Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, Zaretta Hammond states, “Engaging in reflection helps culturally responsive teachers recognize the beliefs,...
How do you get ready for a new school year? There is a lot to do, physically and emotionally. We hope you start the 2022–23 school year feeling rested, rejuvenated, and prepared. To support you, we have curated a collection...
“Any time we go to the next unit I'm looking for what we can use, tweak, modify, build off of. Everyone is always checking the hub—it has saved us so much time in terms of planning this year.” “It made my ability to support...
By Vanessa Cerrahoglu and Danielle Seabold, IM Certified® Facilitators Learners have brilliant mathematical ideas. How we teachers use IM 6–12 Math™ impacts how often students and teachers recognize this brilliance....
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 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 IM Professional Learning Team How do we attend to unfinished teaching and learning, while attending to grade-level expectations? Algebra 1 is often called a “gatekeeper.” Successful completion of Algebra 1 unlocks...
By Kate Nowak, IM Vice President of Curriculum Development and Portfolio “The more intensely interested a teacher is in a student’s thinking, the more interested the student becomes in his or her own thinking.”—Eleanor...
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...
By Vanessa Cerrahoglu and Danielle Seabold, IM Certified® Facilitators Illustrative Mathematics (IM) believes each student has brilliant mathematical ideas has experiences and ideas that are valuable can make sense of and...
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 the IM Team In a class of 25 students, there are 25 different learners with 25 different backgrounds. Students come into the classroom with varied experiences with school, with mathematical content, and with life. While...
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 Elham Kazemi, Co-Author of Intentional Talk and Professor at University of Washington “Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to...
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 the IM Team Educators still face a great deal of uncertainty heading into the 2021–22 school year. Maybe you’ve already started planning for it. Maybe you’ve avoided planning for it. Maybe your school year has already...
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 Jen Hawkins and Mike Nakamaye What do we do with curious students who are ready, willing, and able to go further with math ideas? Some students cannot wait to dig deeper into the mathematics they are studying in class....
By William McCallum Our vision at Illustrative Mathematics is a world where all learners know, use, and enjoy mathematics. In my last post I picked up that first verb and talked about what it means to know mathematics. In...
By Portia Gibbs Roseboro, Britnee Wright, Justin Brennan The IM Community Hub, affectionately known as “The Hub,” was created to support educators using the IM Curriculum in navigating what teaching looks like now....
By Ashley Powell and Moniquea Willingham The excitement and nervousness in the room was almost palpable! There were approximately forty facilitators present for the 3-day IM K–5 Curriculum training in Dallas, Texas. We...
by Vanessa Cerrahoglu, Jennifer Wilson, and Liz Ramirez We envision creating a world where learners know, use, and enjoy mathematics. Knowing and using math goes beyond calculating and evaluating. We create purposeful...
By William McCallum I can't imagine what it must feel like right now to be a teacher facing the uncharted territory that is the coming school year. Will I be teaching 100% online, or have some face-to-face interaction with...
By Vanessa Cerrahoglu, Jennifer Wilson, and Liz Ramirez We envision creating a world where learners know, use, and enjoy mathematics. Knowing and using math goes beyond calculating and evaluating. We create purposeful...
By Jennifer Wilson and Liz Ramirez We envision creating a world where learners know, use, and enjoy mathematics. Knowing and using math goes beyond calculating and evaluating. We create purposeful opportunities for students...
By Jennifer Wilson and Liz Ramirez We want to acknowledge that we are all in different situations that shape how we respond to the call to adapt our teaching to fit a model for distance learning. This impacts the access we...
By William McCallum At Illustrative Mathematics, our mission is to create a world where all learners know, use, and enjoy mathematics. This is not just an idle wish, one that we have because we love mathematics. Sometimes...
“What I find distinguishes IM is that IM Certified Facilitators are uniquely supported by the IM authoring team to ensure the integrity of the curriculum remains intact.” By Kiana Porter-Isom I was always interested in...
By William McCallum I was in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago visiting a school using IM 6–8 Math and was inspired by the efforts the school was making to implement problem-based instruction. I saw teachers at different...
Does the perfect elementary math curriculum exist? Armed with a growth mindset and the Alpha IM K–5 curriculum, teachers in Ipswich Public Schools push their thinking to reach all mathematicians. By Maureen D. O’Connell I...
This blog post is the fourth in a series of four blog posts exploring the student experience of problem-based learning. The first three posts are available here: (1) “How Do Students Perceive Problem-Based Learning?” (2)...
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou By Kristin Gray When I think back to my 8th grade math class, I...
This blog post is the third in a series of four blog posts exploring the student experience of problem-based learning. The first two posts are available here: “How Do Students Perceive Problem-Based Learning?” and “Inviting...
How do we invite students to the mathematics, and explicitly signal to kids that they have ideas that matter in math class? By Max Ray-Riek In this series of blog posts, the first of which is available here, we’re exploring...
Does problem-based learning mean students need to forget everything they knew about how to act in math class? By Max Ray-Riek As a teacher, and then as a coach and teacher-educator, I’ve been thinking for a long time about...
By William McCallum In my first post on the topic of realizing the promise of open educational resources, I described the IM Certified program. Our partners offer multiple versions, including a free online version and...
By Linda Richard, Curriculum Writer I used to teach my high school students a catchy song to memorize the distance formula. We all had fun goofily singing this song. My students hummed it to themselves during tests and...
Illustrative Mathematics It was great to see so many of you at NCSM and NCTM in San Diego. If we missed you, or you weren’t able to attend, read our NCSM and NCTM round-up below. We enjoyed the conversations we had with...
By Kristin Umland,VP Content Development A great conversation I had with the IM elementary school curriculum writing team got me thinking: What is a measurable attribute? That is, when given an object, what can we measure...
By Kate Nowak When I was teaching high school mathematics, my local colleagues and I spent a whole lot of time creating problem-based lessons. We were convinced that this style of instruction was a good way to learn, but...
By Greta Anderson & Patti Drawdy, IM Certified Facilitator I read the lesson three times through, but was still unsure why the number line below shows $3 - 7$. My aha moment arrived courtesy of the grade 1 standards....
By Jennifer Wilson and Vanessa Cerrahoglu Update 2021 - August: IM has created block schedule guidance for IM 6-8 Math v.III and IM 9-12 Math v.I. Get unit guidance on how to customize the curriculum to fit your block...
By William McCallum When I was a child, I used to get puzzle books out of the library. One of the puzzles was the twelve-coin problem, the most difficult of all coin weighing problems. My mother and I worked on it...
My first years of teaching, I worried my students looked at me much like Ben Stein as the teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I cringe to think about the series of monotonous and leading questions I strung together to a...
Classroom environments that foster a sense of community that allows students to express their mathematical ideas—together with norms that expect students to communicate their mathematical thinking to their peers and...
By Anna Polsgrove When I first started the Math Methods course at University of California, Irvine, all of my ideas on how to learn math took a complete 180. During the first two months, a million questions swirled in my...
It was great to see so many of you at NCSM and NCTM. If we missed you, or you weren’t able to attend, read our NCSM and NCTM round-up below. We enjoyed the conversations we had with those of you that are using the IM 6–8...
By William McCallum and Kate Nowak People use routines for all kinds of things. Routines give structure to time and interactions. People like structure. When a child comes home from school, there might be a routine. She...
By Jennifer Wilson One of your students is asked, “What are you learning about today in class?” How does your student respond? “Nothing” “Math” “The questions on this worksheet” “Deciding if two figures are congruent”...
By Kristin Gray As a teacher, curiosity around students’ mathematical thinking was the driving force behind the teaching and learning in my classroom. To better understand what they were thinking, I needed to not only have...
By Jody Guarino As a teacher, I constantly wonder how I can elicit student thinking in order to gain insight into the current thinking of my students and leverage their thoughts and ideas to build mathematical...
The entire Illustrative Mathematics team spends a lot of time reading about teaching and learning. Most recently, we have been reading—some of us rereading—and reflecting on the 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive...
By Robin Moore As a coach, how can I help teachers structure their lesson-planning in order for students to unpack their mathematical understandings? This question is always at the forefront of my mind as I reflect on my...
By Alicia Farmer I am the type of teacher you want on your teaching team. I am the person that can remember vast amounts of details, predict potential obstacles, and meet any and all deadlines. My organized personality is...
“Whether we’re asking students to analyze a historical event, reflect on a text, or work toward a scientific discovery, we need to give students a chance to dig into the ideas on their own first.” By Kristin Gray I’ve come...
In continually moving forward with our vision of creating a world where learners know, use and enjoy mathematics, the Illustrative Mathematics team is so excited to announce the launch of our official blog! Our blog will be...
By William McCallum Somewhere back in days of Facebook fury about the Common Core there was a post from an outraged parent whose child had been marked wrong for something like this: $$ 6 \times 3 = 6 + 6 + 6 = 18. $$...
Co-authored by Bill McCallum, Jason Zimba, Phil Daro You have just purchased an expensive Grecian urn and asked the dealer to ship it to your house. He picks up a hammer, shatters it into pieces, and explains that he will...
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