Dear St. Elizabeth's Community,

Walking into a St. Elizabeth’s math class, you will likely see students moving blocks of base 10 or drawing a number line and hearing exchanges like “I noticed that…” or “The strategy I used was…” and
“I can solve this because…”. And you just might be thinking to yourself, why are we spending so much time talking about math?

During a recent conversation with Maggie Clark, our dedicated Math Coach, she shared insights into our new lower school math curriculum, Bridges in Mathematics. This curriculum helps students connect procedural fluency and conceptual understanding. Often, when students don’t “understand math” it’s because they don’t have a solid conceptual understanding of numbers and why they work to solve a problem. This affects students’ understanding of how to solve a problem. Procedural fluency (the how) refers to the ability to perform mathematical operations efficiently, while conceptual understanding (the why) involves a deeper comprehension of the underlying principles. At its core, math is about understanding the relationship of parts to the whole. To make this very abstract concept concrete for students, they are learning to utilize number lines, base ten blocks, pattern blocks, and other manipulatives to bring the abstract concretely into their hands and, ultimately, their understanding.

Bridges in Mathematics empowers students to think and explain their reasoning as they problem-solve. This is different from the algorithmic approach many of us learned or memorized in school. Today, in our classrooms, students are engaged in math talk, a research-based approach for discussing mathematical thinking and strategies.

At its core, math talk involves explaining how one arrived at the answer they reached. This can be as simple as, "The word 'combine' in the problem made me think of addition, so I added two to two and arrived at four." The magic happens in the conversational aspect that’s encouraged in math talk. Students who might have arrived at a different answer would be prompted to explain their thinking, beginning with a sentence stem like, “I respectfully disagree with you because…” or “I wonder if another way to get there would be…”

The goal for our students is to develop their thinking and logic and to foster a skill set that transcends mathematics and proves invaluable across disciplines and in life. Imagine a world where all discussions include some of the sentence stems listed above. How much richer would our experience be?

Best foot forward,