Introduction

Eliana Belle

This textbook has been created from the compilation of Open Educational Resources (OERs). These chapters cover a wide range of instructional strategies, as well as a few other key components in lesson planning. The intent of these resources is to aid students in the Chemeketa Community College ED 114: Math Instructional Strategies course. The textbook covers student learning goals, instructional math strategies intended for or adaptable to grades within the k-12 band (including high school CTE), considerations and strategies for working with multilingual and immigrant students, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and assessment.

How to use this textbook

Chapters may be assigned to  you via particular learning modules or weeks of instruction within the course, as part of your required reading. Other times, you may be given a variety of options for which chapters you wish to view based on your specific context and what would be most useful to you as you’re working towards your final math activity plan. You may always reference chapters within the textbook and use it as a resource for any/all of your assignments, in addition to other required readings and resources.

In order to get the most out of this book, I encourage you to take notes as you go through the chapters, use the glossary to gain a better understanding of education specific terms or do additional research to better understand these terms/concepts, view additional resources linked within the chapters or additional images/graphics/slides, and complete any multimedia components of the chapters, such as; quizzes, questions, activities, or problems.

This text should help you to:

1. Create a learning objective for a lesson plan or activity
2. Fill your math activity with several age appropriate instructional strategies to enhance student learning and meet the needs of diverse learners
3. Include various formative assessments throughout your activity to gauge student learning in relation to your objective, and provide students with different ways to show their learning
4. Find and modify, or create your own, summative assessment for your math activity that provides students with an authentic task to showcase their learning

The Purpose

The goal is for you to feel confident in creating lessons that support your students  and their diverse learning needs, as well as to empower them to make choices that enhance their own learning. Math can cause anxiety for a lot of students, now is your chance to put students minds at ease by providing them supports, tools, resources, and authentic reasons for the work they’re doing. You may even personally connect with those students, facing math anxiety of your own.  As you’re looking through these math strategies, make personal connections, and think about which of these may have been fun or helpful to you during your k-12 schooling!