Math Practice Standards--Are you being intentional?

Much like the Engineering Design Practices that are a part of the Next Generation Science Standards, the Standards for Mathematical Practice help us to embed best practices to help our students to grow in their general learning skills.

These standards, unlike the content standards, remain the same for all grade levels, and should be used to help our students to develop better problem solving skills and mathematical practices.

These are the 8 practice standards:

1. Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
2. Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
3. Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
4. Model with mathematics.
5. Use appropriate tools strategically.
6. Attend to precision.
7. Look for and make use of structure.
8. Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

It is very easy to find student-friendly language versions of these standards.  I would recommend that you find one that you like and print it and post it in your classroom.

 But, is posting the practice standards enough?  I think that it would be a good idea to look more deeply at them and find ways to embed them into your workshop.  ( I am sure that you will find that many of these are a part of your instruction already.)  The Scholastic website has a nice little guide to helping teachers understand these standards more completely. They are so much more than just the short statements above. The Inside Mathematics website also has some resources to help you with understanding these standards including videos from a variety of grade levels that match each standard. As you watch these videos, you may notice that many math practice standards can be found in just one snippet from a lesson.  Strong math instruction usually has many of these practices included in it.

While you probably won't teach the standards as independent lessons, I think it is worth our while to include the math practice standard(s) along with the math content standard when we are setting the learning intentions for our lessons. Making it more intentional on our part will help our students better begin to understand the value of these practices and allow us to develop stronger mathematicians.