Henry (Hank) Kepner
Are you incorporating reasoning into your lesson plans every day? Are you helping your students make sense of the math in your lessons—every day? If not, you can start helping your students make sense today! NCTM’s new release, Focus in High School Mathematics: Reasoning and Sense Making, aims, as its title suggests, at high school teachers; but sense making and reasoning apply to mathematics for students at all ages. Purposeful questions are important in promoting reasoning: “How do you know?” “Will that always work?” “What will happen if….?” These questions, framed appropriately, are just as important in first grade as in high school. (November 2009)