Comprehending Math
Description
Ellin Oliver Keene, author of Mosaic of Thought
No matter the content area, students need to develop clear ways of thinking about and understanding what they learn. But this kind of conceptual thinking seems more difficult in math than in language arts and social studies. Fortunately we now know how to help kids understand more about mathematics than ever before, and in Comprehending Math youll find out that much of maths conceptual difficulty can be alleviated by adapting what we have learned from research on language and cognition.
In Comprehending Math Arthur Hyde (coauthor of the popular Best Practice) shows you how to adapt some of your favorite and most effective reading comprehension strategies to help your students with important mathematical concepts. Emphasizing problem solving, Hyde and his colleagues demonstrate how to build into your practice math-based variations of:
- KWL
- visualizing
- asking questions
- inferring
- predicting
- making connections
- determining importance
- synthesizing
He then presents a practical way to "braid" together reading comprehension, math problemsolving, and thinking to improve math teaching and learning. Elaborating on this braided model of approach to problem solving, he shows how it can support planning as well as instruction.
Comprehending Math is based on current cognitive research and features more than three dozen examples that range from traditional story problems to open-ended or extended-response problems and mathematical tasks. It gives you step-by-step ideas for instruction and smart, specific advice on planning strategy-based teaching.
Help students do math and get it at the same time. Read Comprehending Math, use its adaptations of familiar language arts strategies, and discover how deeply students can understand math concepts and how well they can use that knowledge to solve problems.
More details
Person
Ellin Oliver Keene has been a classroom teacher, staff developer, non-profit director and adjunct professor of reading and writing. For sixteen years she directed staff development initiatives at the Denver-based Public Education & Business Coalition. She served as Deputy Director and Director of Literacy and Staff Development for the Cornerstone Project at the University of Pennsylvania for 4 years. Ellin works with schools and districts throughout the country and abroad. Her emphasis is long-term, school-based professional development and strategic planning for literacy learning.
Ellin recently published The Literacy Studio: Redesigning the Workshop for Readers and Writers which is focused on an up-to-date conceptualization of Readers/Writers' workshop. She is the author of Engaging Children: Igniting the Drive for Deeper Learning (2018), is co-editor and co-author of The Teacher You Want to Be: Essays about Children, Learning, and Teaching (Heinemann, 2015); co-editor of the Not This, but That series (Heinemann, 2013 - 2018); author of Talk About Understanding: Rethinking Classroom Talk to Enhance Understanding (Heinemann, 2012), To Understand: New Horizons in Reading Comprehension (Heinemann, 2008), co-author of Comprehension Going Forward (Heinemann, 2011), co-author of Mosaic of Thought: The Power of Comprehension Strategy Instruction, 2nd edition (Heinemann, 2007, 1st edition, 1997) and author of Assessing Comprehension Thinking Strategies (Shell Educational Books, 2006) as well as numerous chapters for professional books and journals on the teaching of reading as well as education policy journals.