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The article describes the importance of breaks in the classroom. Take a minute or two to reflect, talk about stress, or just breathe to create an overall better environment for both you and your students.

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Short Breaks Help Students—and Teachers—Find Their Calm

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Simple, quick exercises improve mindfulness, self-regulation, and well-being, for both students and teachers.

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The jigsaw method promotes student engagement, encourages collaboration, and results in better learning. Students are divided and assigned specific content to study, in which they will then perfect in small groups, and finally present to others with different content.

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Quizlet can not only be used as a flashcard tool. Use quizlet to make in class games, study sheets, competition, tutoring help, and so much more. It's very user friendly and free!

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Every child understands every concept differently. Just because one kid has it down, doesn't mean everyone will be able to score a 100 on the test. Guided studying can really help students learn a concept, instead of just using short term memory for specifics without really knowing how the answer had been found.

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The most effective way to study math is not intuitive for a lot of students, so providing explicit instruction on this skill is essential.

Allison Shelley for the Alliance for Excellent Education

When did you first learn how to study math?

For me, it was during freshman year of college. I was frustrated when I got a C on my calculus midterm. It wasn't the C that upset me. I just wanted the grade to represent my understanding, and in this case, I felt like it didn't. I knew all of the concepts on the assessment but made a lot of errors that weren't uncovered until after the test was returned.

In my first few years of teaching, I noticed my students having similar difficulties. Prior to assessments, I would give them a review day to prepare. During one of those sessions, my class was out of control when they were supposed to be studying. In debriefing and reflecting on the challenges we faced that day, I paused and bluntly asked the class, "How do you study math?" In that moment, I realized:

The majority of my students had never been asked that question.

Their misbehavior was the result of a lack of structure and guidance in how to navigate the day.

How to study math is something that students should learn, and it's something that I should teach.

Now at the beginning of each year-before I present my students with any content-I teach them how to study math. This allows them to see the purposeful intent in how everything we do in class during the year will contribute to their learning.

What to Do When Studying Math

Professor Rochelle Gutierrez has said, " Mathematics is not a noun, but a verb." It's not something we know; it's something we do. When we do math, we learn math. Often students make the mistake of thinking that studying math is just reviewing notes or prior work. This perpetuates the detrimental misconception that mathematics is solely something to memorize. It's impossible to memorize each solution pathway to the infinite applicable representations of mathematical concepts. (But chess grand master Magnus Carlsen comes close.)

I tell my students to replicate the modality in which they will be assessed, instead of attempting to memorize when studying. For example, if students are preparing for an individual assessment, they would ideally practice individually. If it's a presentation of learning, they could practice presenting and demonstrating their work to peers, family, or friends. This would allow students to reflect and iterate on their performance before their assessment.

We all make mistakes. The goal of the studying process is for students to be able to catch and correct their mistakes before others evaluate their work. When studying, they want any mistakes that they would potentially make on the assessment to arise in their studying. Therefore, they could be prepared to potentially make and correct that mistake prior to the assessment.

Aligning Instruction to Studying

When studying for an individual assessment, students could do practice tests with answer keys or do problems that they have already completed (not looking at the work or answer as they rewrite the original task on a separate sheet of paper and work to complete it).

To prepare for this, I tell my class, "We can make mistakes; we just can't keep them." After all, mistakes provide learning opportunities, as they demonstrate an area for growth.

Scaffolding Student Agency

If students cannot do the task they are studying, then there is a scaffolded regression they could do to find their zone of proximal development in preparation for the assessment.

1. Students could look back at a similar problem they have completed to see what steps they may have missed, finish the task, and do another. This action reinforces the saying, "Practice doesn't make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect." It doesn't matter how many practice problems they're doing if they don't get the right answer. I often tell my students, "Don't practice until we get it right; practice until we can't get it wrong." I want my students to come into an assessment with the mindset that they have already done this and are ready to demonstrate what they have learned.

2. Students could reference their notes. This is where good note-taking is essential. It becomes a means for students to support themselves with rationale behind the concepts they are expected to know when performing the tasks.

3. Students could reach out to another student or the teacher for support.

When we provide our students with guidance in how to study, they see how they're being set up for their hard work to lead to success. They recognize the connectedness between all of the academic resources they will encounter over the course of the year and how those resources will enable them to both learn and accurately demonstrate their learning.

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The most effective way to study math is not intuitive for a lot of students, so providing explicit instruction on this skill is essential. Allison Shelley for the Alliance for Excellent Education When did you first learn how to study math? For me, it was during freshman year of college.

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All students work at different speeds, but some kids work so slowly that it creates problems for you and the student. Tips that can be implemented to solve this include validation, promote vocalization, and smart partner pairing.

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How do I help slow workers speed things up?

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This is an easy trick that can possibly safe so much stress within a noisy class. Simply wait for everyone's attention instead of immediately giving instruction. This reduces more talking, questions, and noise.

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The 5 Second Solution for a Talkative Class

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This small, simple tweak will immediately improve your effectiveness as a speaker, teacher, or presenter. On top of that, it will give you a greater sense of control and peace of mind, two things presenters could use more of! Want more like this?

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Such quick and easy games that require minimal to no prep work. Students are able to communicate and help each other instead of competition of skill level.

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These games for upper elementary and middle school students require little to no preparation and reinforce math facts.

For many students, math class can feel overwhelming, unwelcoming, and stressful. While there are many ways math teachers can work to shift this mindset in our students, one easy way is to infuse joy into math lessons through games. The following three math games can be done in as little as five minutes once they have been introduced to students and require little to no prep. Additionally, these games can easily be scaled up or down in difficulty to work for any classroom.

1. Buzz (No Prep)

Buzz is a quick and easy way to help students recognize multiples. To play, first have all students stand up. This game works well when students are arranged in rows or a circle but can be done with any arrangement as long as students know the order in which they will participate.

Once all students are standing, select a student to start counting. Before that student says 1, tell the students which multiple they must "buzz" on. For example, you may say that students will buzz on multiples of 3. That means that as the students count, any student whose number is a multiple of 3 will say "Buzz" instead of the number. Any student who says the wrong number or forgets to say "Buzz" is out and sits down.

The game can continue until you have a few students left as the winners. If you have a few students who are particularly nervous about being put on the spot, encourage them to keep track of the numbers called on a piece of paper to better prepare themselves for their turn. Remind those students that the game moves quickly and very little attention will be given to any single mistake.

The game will sound like this if students are going to buzz on multiples of 3:

Student A begins counting at "1." The next student in the given order (make sure to tell students the order in which they will go) continues with "2." The third student says, "Buzz." The next student then picks up and says "4."

To scale up the difficulty, you can have students buzz on a more difficult multiple, such as 7 or 12. You could even require students to buzz on common multiples of a given two numbers such as 3 and 4.

2. What Number Am I? (No Prep)

This game is a great way to practice not only fact fluency but math vocabulary, too. To play, select one student to be the first player. That student will come to the front of the class with their back to the board. On the board behind them, you will write a number so that the student cannot see what it is.

All other students will then give the player clues to help him or her guess the number. Students must raise their hands and, when called on by the player, can give one math fact as a clue. When the player accurately guesses the number, they select the next player to come to the board.

The game will sound like this:

Student A comes to the board and faces the class. The number 18 is written on the board. Student A calls on student B for a clue, and student B says, "You are the product of 3 and 6." If student A knows this product, they can say, "I'm 18!" but if they are not sure, they can call on another student for a new clue.

To scale down the difficulty, you might tell students to only use addition and subtraction facts as clues and to emphasize words like sum and difference. You may want to focus on smaller numbers to write on the board.

To scale up the difficulty, you may give students larger numbers to work with, encourage the use of multiplication and division facts, or have students use square roots and exponents in their clues.

3. Fact Fluency Challenge (Minimal Prep)

This game allows students to engage in a competition as they work on given fluency practice. To play, split the class into two teams and select a representative from each team to start. I like to bring two chairs to the front of the room so the participants are right in front of the board when they play. On the board, post a math fact; the first student to answer wins a point for their team. The participants rotate so that each team member gets an opportunity to compete.

I use an online math fact generator so that I can quickly present math facts for a given operation and number range. If you want math facts that address a specific topic not easily found in an online flashcard version, you can make your own slide show to use with your students.

To scale down the difficulty, focus on single-digit numbers dealing with addition and subtraction, and to scale up the difficulty, you could focus on larger numbers dealing with multiplication or division, use decimals or fractions, or require students to simplify a multi-operation expression.

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These games for upper elementary and middle school students require little to no preparation and reinforce math facts. For many students, math class can feel overwhelming, unwelcoming, and stressful. While there are many ways math teachers can work to shift this mindset in our students, one easy way is to infuse joy into math lessons through games.

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When we break down learning into smaller, actionable steps, we can partner with our students and empower them to own their learning and see lasting results more quickly. It’s important for students to be aware of the processes they are building as problem solvers. Provide validation, clear grading, and dedicate time to personally helping out students that are struggling.

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As math teachers, we've all had students who struggled with mathematical problem-solving. Now more than ever, this seems to be a rising cause for concern in the wake of the pandemic. Maybe it's because students didn't have as much exposure to mathematical situations due to being at home more, or maybe it stems from the lack of time to fill in learning that has been missed, so we rush more quickly through the concrete understanding within problems to the abstract part of solving.

Regardless of the reason, there are some things we can do to build up our students' skills in this area.

When we break down learning into smaller, actionable steps, we can partner with our students and empower them to own their learning and see lasting results more quickly. It's important for students to be aware of the processes they are building as problem solvers and how that will help them to be ready for the future in more than just the math classroom.

5 Ways to Boost Students' Problem-Solving Skills

1. We can immerse students in problem-solving in all aspects of the math workshop: When teaching a specific computational strategy, embedding numbers in word problems helps students to build operational sense and reasoning behind using a skill. Even number sense and fact fluency can be sprinkled with context. During small group instruction, teachers can strategically and flexibly place students in groups that focus on building specific process skills, not only computation.

Using a simple chart can help you to sort through data and add students to specific groups based on the needs you see as you look through their work. Guided math groups could focus on teach points, such as being able to visualize the problem, utilize a representation to help them solve, or write an answer statement to help students recontextualize the problem after they've solved it.

Strategy groups would be focused more on computation or place value needs. If you're unsure of a student's understanding, you can place them in the conferring column. Conferring with students one-on-one provides space where the teacher can listen to students thinking out loud to get a better understanding of their mathematical ability.

2. We can give students consistent exposure to high-quality problem-solving: According to Peter Liljedahl, author of Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, "Good problem-solving tasks require students to get stuck and then to think, to experiment, to try and to fail, and to apply their knowledge in novel ways in order to get unstuck."

The go-to in our district for promoting productive math struggle is Exemplars. This resource encourages students to get stuck and power through really difficult, real-world, multistep situations. The tasks they provide encourage students to show their thinking processes in a variety of ways. You can really tell it's a great task if all student thinking looks different. In a world where instant gratification has become the norm, we can remind students that when they get stuck, it's exciting! This challenging moment is part of learning and making new connections in their brain.

3. We can be intentional about providing students with a variety of problems that contain a blend of previously learned skills: This makes it necessary for students to think and make sense of every problem they encounter, instead of being able to anticipate an operation based on current content or the title on the page.

For example, when students practice independently, one or two problems could be on a recently obtained skill, but there could also be a problem from a previous cluster of learning and one for an upcoming concept from a lower grade level. Not only does this provide students with an opportunity to practice their problem-solving skills; it gives the teacher the opportunity to ensure that students are retaining previously learned skills from earlier in the year and from the prior year.

Checking in on skills from the previous year can be a preassessment and helps the teacher to adjust future pacing, since they are informed about student needs before a new cluster of learning is started. Number sense routines are also the perfect time to offer a variety of problems within the math workshop because students get the daily opportunity to see peers solve problems flexibly, observe that computation can be approached in different ways, have a specific time to play with numbers, and build connections across concepts. I've compiled some great options for number sense (most of these are free).

4. We can make cross-content connections with reading and math: Utilizing a consistent reasoning routine across grade levels can create a habitual way of thinking for students as they make sense of problems. A good resource for this is Routines for Reasoning. The 3 Reads routine from this resource is great for making connections to reading comprehension. You could ask students, "Who are the characters in this problem? What are they doing? What is the setting? What happened in the beginning, middle, and end?" When students begin to think this way and train their brain to go through this process of visualization, it becomes more automatic, and students start to become sense makers.

5. We can ensure that our grading and assessment practices reflect our values: One way to do this is to bring students into the learning process by using a rubric, such as this one, as a self-assessment tool of the problem-solving processes. I have seen teachers utilize this as a whole class by focusing on one column at a time, where the teacher led the class in scoring teacher-created student work. Students would then later rate themselves and focus on how to move themselves to a higher level within the rubric on that skill. I've also seen teachers be very successful with using this rubric during one-on-one conferring.

According to the specific student's understanding, the teacher can point them to analyze their work based on a specific column of the rubric. The teacher then guides the student to make a plan to focus on that one skill.

This might look like pointing the student to an anchor chart of representations in the classroom as a reference, helping the student with some sentence stems for communication, or even giving the student a word bank to help them learn how to use more math vocabulary within their justification. Teaching students how to use a tool like this one can give them a more concrete way of pushing themselves to deeper levels of learning, not just toward getting the correct answer.

I've also seen teachers display "expert"-level student work in the classroom as a guide for other students who are striving toward the same goal. Another encouraging tool could be a checklist with each problem, to give credit for correct representations and justification of thinking in addition to a correct answer.

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5 Ways to Bolster Students' Confidence in Math

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As math teachers, we've all had students who struggled with mathematical problem-solving. Now more than ever, this seems to be a rising cause for concern in the wake of the pandemic.

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Implement little activities that can get people talking. Group exit tickets or open ended questions that require group work at the board. I liked the revoicing method. Here students repeat the lesson that was taught in a way the class can understand. If they can't do that, they may have not fully grasped the concept taught.

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Talking through their math work helps students understand it better, and these strategies get those conversations started.

Michael Dwyer / Alamy Stock Photo

Math teachers often focus on having students complete problems in writing, rather than talking through their thought processes. However, if students are not talking and explaining in math class, they are not truly understanding. Luckily, there are some routines that can be implemented in math classrooms to increase student voice. The routines discussed here are drawn from Principles for the Design of Mathematics Curricula: Promoting Language and Content Development, published by Stanford University's Graduate School of Education.

We both work as instructional coaches. Prior to our work as full-time coaches, we were both classroom teachers. We have witnessed firsthand how the implementation of these routines can transform a classroom of disengaged students into engaged learners.

Routine 1: Stronger and Clearer Each Time

The purpose of Stronger and Clearer Each Time, according to Principles for the Design of Mathematics Curricula, is "to provide a structured and interactive opportunity for students to revise and refine both their ideas and their verbal and written output."

Strategy-Successive Pair Share: This strategy is used when you want students to revise their own work. Teachers provide an equation for students to solve independently. Then, with a partner, each student shares the steps they used to reach the solution. After hearing what worked for their classmate, each student has a chance to revise their own work based on what they heard. The process continues, and the students share the new version of the equation with a new partner, get feedback, and return to editing.

In a recent trip to a geometry class, students were tackling paragraph proofs to show triangle congruence. The teacher had students engage in Successive Pair Share in order to help their proofs become more precise. As I (Rachel) watched this activity, I saw students start with a vague and incomplete proof, and through ideas from their classmates, they solidified their own ideas, which resulted in a more complete proof. I also witnessed multiple emergent multilingual students gain a better understanding of how to use the mathematical vocabulary in their writing.

Routine 2: Critique, Correct, and Clarify

This routine is used when you want students to respond to each other's work, thoughts, and ideas.

Strategy-My Favorite No: The teacher chooses work from a student that has a commonly made error. The teacher then presents that work to the class. The first prompt from the teacher is "What is correct about this work?" The students confer in small groups to discuss places where the student's work is correct. The teacher then asks, "What could the student have done better?" The students return to their small groups to discuss aspects of the work that could be improved. The students then have time to correctly solve the problem individually.

I (Rachel) used exit tickets at the end of each class period that asked students to reflect on material we'd covered in class that day. I would then use My Favorite No at the start of every class period to review the exit ticket from the day before. By using My Favorite No, teachers are both celebrating the learning process and reinforcing the idea that mistakes are necessary. My Favorite No is typically done anonymously. However, if there is a strong classroom culture where mistakes are highly valued, then it can be done using a student's name.

Strategy-Always Sometimes Never: The teacher provides statements to the students, and the students decide if the statement is always, sometimes, or never true. For example:

Linear equations have slope (sometimes).

Linear equations have a y-intercept (sometimes) .

Linear equations have an x-intercept (sometimes) .

A point that satisfies the equation will also appear on the graph of the equation (always).

The graph of a linear equation will travel through all four quadrants (never).

Students work in pairs or teams to decide if the statements are always, sometimes, or never true. There are a few options for implementing this strategy. All groups can be given the same statements on paper or projected using a slide. Or, each table can get a different statement and then make a Flipgrid video with an example that defends their reasoning. I (Stephanie) often support the use of Flipgrid, a recording tool that promotes social learning, in math classes.

Routine 3: Discussion Supports

The Discussion Supports routine is used, as Principles for the Design of Mathematics Curricula notes, to increase student voice by supporting "rich and inclusive discussions about mathematical ideas, representations, contexts, and strategies."

Strategy-Revoicing: When I (Rachel) revoice during instruction, I start with the problem and review it. For the problem "Graph the line 3 x + 6 y = 12," my direct instruction begins like this: "There are multiple ways to graph this line. I'm going to start by converting it into slope-intercept form. Slope intercept form is y = mx + b, so I need to isolate the y term. To do this, I'm going to subtract 3 x from both sides of the equation." Table groups then explain the process I just reviewed to one another. At this point, I expect students to say something pretty similar to what I just said. If they can't explain it back, that is an indication that they need to ask a clarifying question of either their classmate or me.

These routines transform learning into an active process. If students are only watching their teacher do math, they are not able to explain what is happening because they are not the ones experiencing the math. When voice is increased in math, students not only become more engaged but also gain a deeper understanding of the content.

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3 Strategies to Get Students Talking in Math Classrooms

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Talking through their math work helps students understand it better, and these strategies get those conversations started. Michael Dwyer / Alamy Stock Photo Math teachers often focus on having students complete problems in writing, rather than talking through their thought processes. However, if students are not talking and explaining in math class, they are not truly understanding.

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Math does not have to be categorized into who is "a math person" and "who isn't a math person". Kids tend to get really anxious when the answer they get is wrong, or if they find an answer a different way. Implement things such as stories, alternate ways to solve, or open ended questions allowing for more creativity.

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Math class doesn't have to be stressful for students-educators can reframe math as a creative, empowering tool that's relevant to everyday life. Learn more about the studies and articles cited in the video from the links below:

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How to Ease Math Anxiety in the Classroom

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Math class doesn't have to be stressful for students-educators can reframe math as a creative, empowering tool that's relevant to everyday life. Learn more about the studies and articles cited in the video from the links below: