Many of you are using a new Common Core-aligned math curriculum, or if you are in the School District of Philadelphia, your school may have just chosen a new math program. This is good news for both you and your students. For your students, using the same math program within and across grades will provide them with instructional and mathematical coherence. For you and your colleagues, this means that you can put your efforts into the quality of instruction, not in writing or finding materials.
With that said, implementing a new math program can often feel overwhelming. Fortunately, you have the knowledge and skills from your OGAP Multiplicative Reasoning and Fraction professional development that can help. Teachers who have received OGAP training consistently say that the knowledge of the math education research on how students learned specific math concepts helps them understand and use their math program materials more effectively.
Key strategies for developing understanding and fluency in multiplication and division include using place value understanding, visual models, properties of operations, and varying the structures of problems. Our review of recently published math programs such as Expressions, Envision, and Go Math! indicates that they are similar in their approaches to teaching multiplication and division: They cover the content as outlined in the CCSSM, introduce and build understanding of the concepts using visual models and reasoning, and have a variety of word problems as highlighted on the OGAP Framework.
