IM Certified® Blog
Illustrative Mathematics and IM Certified Partners featured at NCSM and NCTM 2022
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...
Promoting Change: Reflections from the UnboundEd Five-Day Standards Institute™ 2022
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,...
The Story of Grade 8 Unit 3: Linear Relationships
By Ashli Black and Elisa Smith Grade 8 is a year marked by shifts in mathematical focus. Where grades 6 and 7 introduce students to negative numbers and using them in operations, grade 8 introduces them to irrational...
Creating Collaborative Math Classrooms
This blog post was written by William McCallum, co-founder and CEO of Illustrative Mathematics, and originally posted on the ImagineLearning blog. Collaboration is a core value at Illustrative Mathematics. Creating a...
Tackling Wordy Problems: How the Three Reads Math Language Routine Supports Access for All Learners
by Joe Herbert “These problems are great, but they’re just so wordy. My students can’t handle all that reading!” Does this feel familiar? If so, you’re not alone! Many students and teachers struggle with the language...
Getting Ready for 2022–23: Back to School Blog Posts
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...
Empowering Students with the Geometry Reference Chart
By Tina Cardone Geometry class can feel like word salad, with a heavy sprinkling of notation on top. Students need to both process and produce mathematical language in the vast majority of the tasks they work on. Here is a...
The Story of Grade 4
By Patti Drawdy and Yenche Tioanda “Why not start the year with place value?” Kaneka Turner, Grade 4 Lead Writer, hears this question often. Isn’t making sense of and operating on large numbers pretty essential in grade 4?...
The IM Community Hub is Becoming the IM Resource Hub—Here’s Why
“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...
Creating a space for students to become expert learners
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....
Making IM Centers Work: Joyful Practice, Meaningful Fluency, and Authentic Assessment
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...
How to Support Multilingual Learners With Higher Expectations
This blog post was written by Suzanne Marks, Partner, TNTP and originally posted on the TNTP blog. TNTP recently partnered with Stanford University’s Center for Understanding Language (UL) to develop strategies for ensuring...
The Story of Grade 3
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...
The Story of Grade 2
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...
Towards Coherence
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...
IM Curriculum Provides Everything but the Kitchen Sink Needed for Lesson Planning
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...
The Story of Kindergarten
By Alexandra Clayton Many 5 year olds love to tell you (and show you) how high they can count. This skill of rote counting, saying the counting words in the same order each time, is a lot like singing the ABCs . While...
Using IM Algebra 1 Extra Support Materials to Address Unfinished Learning: An Example
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...
Two Recommendations to Elevate Instruction
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...
Math Language Routines: Discourse with a Purpose
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...
Leveraging IM 6–12 Math Teacher Materials to Enhance Access to Grade-Level Mathematics
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...
The Story of Grade 1
By Brianne Durst Grade 1 teachers have the awesome responsibility of introducing their students to, and helping them build an understanding of, the structure of our number system. This is no small task! Just think about how...
A Thread Through Early Algebra 1
By David Petersen, 6–12 Curriculum Specialist andAshli Black, Director, 6–12 Curriculum The Algebra 1 course in IM 9–12 Math™ begins with a unit on one-variable statistics, a choice that many find surprising. Why start with...
Revisiting Distance Learning with IM K–12 Math™
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...
