Focus on High School: Eliciting and Using Students’ Thinking and Building Procedural Fluency from Conceptual Understanding (Taking Action)

Presented by Melissa Boston

Taking Action: Bringing the Effective Teaching Practices to Life in your Classroom Webinar Series

In high school mathematics, supporting students to understand important mathematical procedures and concepts is essential in promoting ongoing participation and success in mathematics and other STEM fields. In this session, participants will explore the Effective Mathematics Teaching Practices of (1) building procedural fluency from conceptual understanding and (2) eliciting and using evidence of students’ thinking. We will consider how sequences of tasks can establish a conceptual foundation for building fluency and understanding of procedures by providing opportunities for students to recognize structure and make sense of repeated reasoning. We will analyze students’ work to consider the importance of eliciting students’ thinking and using their thinking to determine our next instructional moves. We will also discuss how the ideas highlighted during the session can generalize to other mathematical topics in the high school curriculum.