How much do you know? How much do you need to know?
Each grade-band book in NCTM’s best-selling Essential Understanding Series addresses a topic that is widely recognized as challenging for teachers to teach and students to learn. Teachers need to know much more than they expect their students to learn, and each book in this series
develops core concepts that the books identify as the “big ideas” and related “essential understandings” that unlock these topics.
The Essential Understanding books deepen and enrich teachers’ understanding by exploring, developing, and reflecting on ideas and connections that enable teachers to answer students’ questions, correct their misconceptions, and scaffold their progress to the next level. Whether
you’re teaching kindergartners to count or high school students to design a statistical investigation, books in the Essential Understanding Series can give you the solid mathematical foundation you need to be at the top of your game.
The sixteen-volume Essential Understanding Series is now complete, with grade-band volumes devoted to the following topics:
For pre-K–2: number and numeration; addition and subtraction; geometry and measurement
For grades 3–5: algebraic thinking; rational numbers; multiplication and division; geometry and measurement
For grades 6–8: ratios, proportions, and proportional reasoning; expressions, equations, and functions; geometry; statistics
For grades 9–12: functions; proof and proving; geometry; statistics
For pre-K–grade 8: mathematical reasoning
The bundled set of all sixteen volumes can be especially useful to teachers, administrators, and others who are planning professional development for teachers or for those who are working to align a school’s or district’s mathematics curriculum with the Common Core State
Standards or other college- and career-ready standards.
Focus on the ideas that you need to understand thoroughly to teach confidently.