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At PS 29, we believe strongly that math must make sense to our students. To that end, our curriculum and teaching methods put deep conceptual understanding first. We encourage students to see mathematics as a broad subject that involves investigating, exploring, talking, representing ideas with tools and visual models, and recognizing the underlying structure of our number system and the ways in which the operations work. Our curriculum, Eureka Math Squared, is closely aligned with New York’s Next Generation Learning Standards. We also supplement our curriculum with teacher-created lessons and tasks that give students lots of opportunities to develop mathematical ideas, share their thinking with others, and learn from the members of their classroom math communities.
Our staff came together in 2016 to articulate our beliefs about the teaching of mathematics, based on research, our collective experience, and our knowledge of best practices in mathematics education. The following dispositions underlie our teaching of math at PS 29:
We want to create safe, supportive, equitable math communities in our classrooms where students feel that all voices are valued and they are willing to take risks.
We want students to view mistakes in math as valuable opportunities for learning.
We want our classrooms to put deep conceptual understanding and sense-making first, and we believe that fluency follows understanding.
We want our teaching to support multiple pathways for solving problems, student choice of methods and tools, and student ownership of math learning.
We want our classrooms to be places where communication and discussion are important parts of math learning.
We believe that the role of the teacher is to flexibly facilitate math learning and encourage students to see math -- not the teacher -- as the authority.
We want our math classrooms to be sites for investigation, exploration, creativity, and positive feelings about mathematics.
Our staff engages in regular math professional development with the support of our in-house math coach, Kim Van Duzer. We are members of the Math Collective, a group of New York City teachers and coaches who hold lesson studies, lead and attend workshops, and design tasks and tools for classroom use. Several of our teachers have also attended the NYC Math Lab, an outgrowth of the Math Collective.
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