Teacher Materials

Teachers are an integral part of the learning process in Connected Mathematics (CMP). From the beginning, the authors have viewed CMP as a curriculum for both students and teachers. CMP provides teachers with ways to think about and enact problem-centered teaching and learning. The extensive field-testing of CMP has helped produce teacher materials that are rich with successful strategies, classroom dialogue and questions, and examples of student solutions and reasoning.

Each of the 23 student Units in CMP3 is accompanied by teacher support in the form of the Teacher Place or the printed Teacher Guides and Teacher Resources. The teacher support for each Unit includes a discussion of the mathematics underlying the Investigations, mathematical and problem-solving goals for each Investigation, planning charts, standards correlations, connections to other Units, in-depth teaching notes, answers, labsheets, teaching aids, parent letters, and an extensive assessment package.

The teacher support engages teachers in a conversation about what is possible in the classroom around a particular lesson. Suggestions are made about how to engage the students in the mathematics task in the launch, how to promote student thinking and reasoning during the exploration of the Problem, and how to summarize with the students the important mathematics embedded in the Problem. Support for this Launch–Explore–Summarize sequence occurs for each Problem in the curriculum.