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 the shifts teachers need to make when using a...
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 enhanced versions with different options for...
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 successfully calculated distances. I was pleased...
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 those of you that are using the IM 6–8 Math...
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 about it? Before you jump in with your own...
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 the textbooks in use at our school simply...
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. Greta: Over the course of this past year,...
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 schedule in the IM Community Hub. IM 6–8 Math...
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 separately at the same time, and she solved it first....
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 room of dazed students slowly wilting in front...
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