COVID-19: CMP Resources
August 2020
Update: New blog post on the CMP mathematics curriculum during COVID-19. The Impact of COVID-19 on School Mathematics Curriculum.
June 2020
Dear CMP Colleagues
Teachers and school districts are facing many challenges as they plan for the 2020-21 school year. Giving individual guidance is difficult because what you do depends on so many variables.
For example
For the 2019-2020 School Year...
- Did all students have access to learning the mathematics previously viewed as essential for their grade level?
- Were students able to access the opportunities?
- Did they have access in the same ways?
- What stress did your students experience? (learning or otherwise)
For the 2020-2021 School Year...
- Will you be meeting with your students face-to-face? If so, how many minutes each day?
- Will you also have remote days? IF so, will you meet synchronously or asynchronously?
- Will it be a combination of remote and face-to-face interactions?
- Will all students have equal access to learning mathematics?
- What are your state and local policies and mandates for what content to teach?
- How are they changing for this year, if at all?
- Is your state continuing testing this year?
- Will tests be adjusted in any way? If so what is being considered as essential knowledge? If not, what areas is knowledge do the test focus on?
Student mathematical understanding and reasoning...
- What do you view as the essential learnings for your students next year?
- Given all of the special circumstances, what is it you would like students to "walk away knowing" at the end of the school year?
- What is most important to help students manage and overcome this "bump in the road" for their mathematics learning?
Some Thoughts
CMP has always focused on a single mathematical standard:
“All students should be able to reason and communicate proficiently in mathematics.”
We recommend that you try to focus on the skills and reasoning that can help students throughout their mathematical lives. This includes students' ability to:
- Solve problems, make conjectures, estimate, test, discuss, evaluate, generalize and communicate strategies and mathematical understandings
- Make sense of mathematics and how it connects to other thinking, other mathematics, and our world
- Approach problems with curiosity to reason through questions
As you make strategic decisions about what to teach, keep in mind that students' sense of themselves as knowers, doers, and creators of mathematics can carry them through many situations.
These resources may be helpful in the planning for next school year.
CMP at Michigan State University