Guidance for Pacing

Guidance for pacing:

• Limit the amount of time spent on the warm-ups by using a timer that is visible to students. It is easy to spend too much time on the warm-up because the routines foster great conversations that are sometimes difficult for teachers to stop.

• No matter what, do not skip the lesson synthesis. The lesson synthesis is the opportunity to stamp the day's learning and make connections to the learning goals.

• The student editions should not be thought of as workbooks that need to be completed fully. Every student does not have to finish every question before moving on to the synthesis. Students should be able to finish or refine their answers during and after the synthesis.

• Use the Check Your Readiness assessments to anticipate the background knowledge that you do and do not need to cover. (For example, you can avoid spending a whole day reviewing the Pythagorean Theorem if students remember how to use it from grade 8.) Each CYR item includes a teacher narrative with guidance for adding additional questions, highlighting particular content, or offering certain tools or supports.

• If it seems like all students didn’t quite get the point of a lesson or didn’t do very well on a cool-down, use the Responding to Student Thinking guidance that is connected to the cool-down. It may be that students will have many more opportunities to solidify their understanding of an idea and at this point in the unit, they are expected to use informal strategies and experience productive struggle.

• It might be a good idea to set a PLC agenda item for mid to late October to look at where you are in the curriculum at that point, rather than waiting until later in the year to realize there’s not enough time. If needed, make intentional decisions about what you’re not going to address this year.

• If you’re having trouble getting through lessons at a rate of one per day, there are alternative options for slowing down. For example, are you spending 15 minutes reviewing homework? (How else can students evaluate and learn from their practice?) Is it taking 20 minutes to get through a five-minute warm-up? (Seek out examples of how a Math Talk can be done well in under 10 minutes, practice this with your team, and try some strategies like setting a timer.)

• Review these helpful blog posts, which can be used as conversation starters in PLCs or in department meetings to get teachers thinking about upcoming changes with the IM problem-based approach:

• Exploring the Lesson Synthesis: When Do I Actually Teach?

• How Do You Start the Year?

• How Do Students Perceive Problem-Based Learning?

• Inviting Students to the Mathematics

• Concrete Representations That Give Students a Way to Get Started

• Explicit Classroom Norms to Teach Kids How to Learn from Solving Problems

• The 5 Practices Framework: Explicit Planning vs. Explicit Teaching