By Margaret (Peg) Smith, Victoria Bill, and Miriam Gamoran Sherin

“Neither a love of students nor a love of mathematics can sustain the work of math education on its own. We work with math students, a composite of their mathematical ideas and their identities as people. The five practices for orchestrating productive mathematical discussions, and these ideas for putting those practices into practice, offer the actions that can develop and sustain the belief that both math and students matter.”  From the Foreword by Dan Meyer, Chief Academic Officer, Desmos 

Take a deeper dive into understanding the five practices-anticipating, monitoring, selecting, sequencing, and connecting-for facilitating productive mathematical conversations in your elementary classroom and learn to apply them with confidence. This follow-up to the modern classic, 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions, shows each practice in action in K-grade 5 classrooms and empowers teachers to be prepared for and overcome the challenges common to orchestrating math discussions.

The chapters unpack the five practices and guide teachers to a deeper understanding of how to use each practice effectively in an inquiry-oriented classroom. This book will help you launch meaningful mathematical discussion through-

• key questions to help you set learning goals, identify high-level tasks, anticipate student responses, and develop targeted assessment and progressive questions that jumpstart productive discussion-before class begins; 
• video excerpts from real elementary 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; and
• “Linking To Your Own Instruction” sections that 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.