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 Sonja Twedt, IM Certified® Facilitator, IM 6-12 Writing Team Special Projects Course Assistant “In the digital era, data is the new oil.” —Srini Vemula I can’t think of many middle school students I know who are not...
By Courtney Ortega, IM Certified® Facilitator I was recently in a meeting where a participant declared, “Grade 8 and Algebra 1 basically have all the same standards.” Have you ever wondered this yourself? Have you heard...
By William McCallum, IM CEO co·her·ence noun the quality of being logical and consistent. the quality of forming a unified whole. One of the things I am proud of about IM K–12 Math™ is its coherence. This shows up in many...
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 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...
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?...
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 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...
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...
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 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 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 Dionne Aminata “We are striving to . . . compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.” Poet...
By Kristin Gray This was originally posted on Kristin Gray’s personal blog, Math Minds, on November 15, 2020. Student work is just the best. It is the one thing that will always motivate me to write! So, let’s kick this...
by William McCallum Newspapers are full of graphs, far more than 10 or 20 years ago. Indeed, I have a graph to show that! (Source, Priceonomics) And yet I wonder how often readers see graphs as pictures illustrating a...
by Sarah Caban From the start of the year, we want students to know they are capable of engaging in grade-level mathematics. In the Opportunity Myth (2018), data shows that there is an opportunity gap for historically...
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...
By Kate Nowak How do we help our students build mathematical understandings that endure past the unit test? If we want students to construct strong, reliable bases of mathematical knowledge, our instruction needs to do more...
By William McCallum The number line is a seemingly simple object: a straight line with two points marked 0 and 1. Those two points are the seeds of great complexity, however. Whole numbers are located at positions marked...
By William McCallum In grade 3, as students start to learn about multiplication, they think about products like 6 x 7 in terms of equal groups. 6 x 7 is the number of things when you have 6 groups with 7 things in each...
By Jenna Laib and Kristin Gray Take a moment to think about the value of each expression below. $\frac{1}{4}\times \frac{1}{3}$ $\frac{1}{4}\times \frac{2}{3}$ $\frac{2}{4}\times \frac{2}{3}$ $\frac{3}{4}\times...
We want students to think about math deeply. Creatively. Analytically. Instead, what often happens is that students race towards quick solutions. So what can we do to support this other kind of thinking in class—the slow,...
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