Great article on division with remainders

One of Chicago's Lesson Study Leaders, Joshua Lerner, wrote a terrific article in NCTM's journal Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching in PK-12. It is titled, "Recommendations for Teaching Division with Remainders." From the introduction: Recently our team of...

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Fractions as numbers vs. fractions as ratios

A grade 4 team was recently considering the following task for a lesson in which they hoped to have students make a connection between fractions and decimals: What would you say about this? I wrote them two emails about it. First email: What would be the purpose of...

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Facilitating a post-lesson discussion

In response to multiple requests, I have finally written up this guide for facilitating a post-lesson discussion, which you can also find on our resources page. I will say that cultivating a good post-lesson discussion tends to be easiest if the planning team has a...

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Learning goals should describe cognitive change

A surprisingly difficult but critically important part of designing a lesson is establishing the learning goals. Many teachers write learning goals in the form of behavioral outcomes: “Students will be able to…” Frequently this is what their administrators want, and...

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The choice of numbers matters!

The choice of numbers matters!

I am looking at a lesson research proposal for grade 5 on division of decimal values by a whole number. The problem the team plans to use is 4.26 ÷ 3, and their goal is for students to discover that the same processes they use to model division with whole numbers...

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