The Five Practices in Practice [Middle School]: Successfully Orchestrating Mathematics Discussions in Your Middle School Classroom

Take a deep dive into the five practices for facilitating productive mathematical discussions

Enhance your fluency in the five practices—anticipating, monitoring, selecting, sequencing, and connecting—to bring powerful discussions of mathematical concepts to life in your middle school classroom. This book unpacks the five practices for deeper understanding and empowers you to use each practice effectively.

• Video excerpts vividly illustrate the five practices in action in real middle school classrooms 
• Key questions help you set learning goals, identify high-level tasks, and jumpstart discussion
• Prompts guide you to be prepared for and overcome common challenges

Includes planning templates, sample lesson plans and completed monitoring tools, and mathematical tasks.  

• Key questions to set learning goals, identify high-level tasks, anticipate student responses, and develop targeted assessing and advancing questions that jumpstart productive discussion—before class begins 
• Video excerpts from real middle school classrooms that vividly illustrate the five practices in action and include built-in opportunities for you to consider effective ways to monitor students’ ideas, and successful approaches for selecting, sequencing, and connecting students’ ideas during instruction 
• “Pause and Consider” prompts that help you reflect on an issue—and, in some cases, draw on your own classroom experience—prior to reading more about it
• “Linking To Your Own Instruction” sections help you implement the five practices with confidence in your own instruction

The book and companion website provide an array of resources including planning templates, sample lesson plans and completed monitoring tools, and mathematical tasks. Enhance your fluency in the five practices to bring powerful discussions of mathematical concepts to life in your classroom.

"This books takes 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions to the next level as readers experience what these practices look like in real mathematics classrooms in middle school. The authors specifically address the challenges one might face in implementing the classrooms by providing recommendations and concrete examples to avoid these challenges. This book is a must read for teachers who want to amplify their classroom implementation of the five practices."
Cathy Martin, Executive Director of Curriculum & Instruction
Denver Public Schools