Comprehending Math: Adapting Reading Strategies to Teach Mathematics, K-6

For those who devour Comprehending Math as I did, their teaching will be clearer, bolder, more connected. And for the ultimate beneficiaries, they will have a chance to understand just how integrally our world is connected.
Ellin Oliver Keene, author of Mosaic of Thought

No matter the content area, students need to develop clear ways of thinking about and understanding what they learn. But this kind of conceptual thinking seems more difficult in math than in language arts and social studies. Fortunately we now know how to help kids understand more about mathematics than ever before, and in Comprehending Math youll find out that much of maths conceptual difficulty can be alleviated by adapting what we have learned from research on language and cognition.

In Comprehending Math Arthur Hyde (coauthor of the popular Best Practice) shows you how to adapt some of your favorite and most effective reading comprehension strategies to help your students with important mathematical concepts. Emphasizing problem solving, Hyde and his colleagues demonstrate how to build into your practice math-based variations of:

• KWL
• visualizing
• asking questions
• inferring
• predicting
• making connections
• determining importance
• synthesizing

He then presents a practical way to "braid" together reading comprehension, math problemsolving, and thinking to improve math teaching and learning. Elaborating on this braided model of approach to problem solving, he shows how it can support planning as well as instruction.

Comprehending Math is based on current cognitive research and features more than three dozen examples that range from traditional story problems to open-ended or extended-response problems and mathematical tasks. It gives you step-by-step ideas for instruction and smart, specific advice on planning strategy-based teaching.

Help students do math and get it at the same time. Read Comprehending Math, use its adaptations of familiar language arts strategies, and discover how deeply students can understand math concepts and how well they can use that knowledge to solve problems.

Ellin Oliver Keene has been a classroom teacher, staff developer, non-profit director and adjunct professor of reading and writing. For sixteen years she directed staff development initiatives at the Denver-based Public Education & Business Coalition. She served as Deputy Director and Director of Literacy and Staff Development for the Cornerstone Project at the University of Pennsylvania for 4 years. Ellin works with schools and districts throughout the country and abroad. Her emphasis is long-term, school-based professional development and strategic planning for literacy learning.

Ellin recently published The Literacy Studio: Redesigning the Workshop for Readers and Writers which is focused on an up-to-date conceptualization of Readers/Writers' workshop. She is the author of Engaging Children: Igniting the Drive for Deeper Learning (2018), is co-editor and co-author of The Teacher You Want to Be: Essays about Children, Learning, and Teaching (Heinemann, 2015); co-editor of the Not This, but That series (Heinemann, 2013 - 2018); author of Talk About Understanding: Rethinking Classroom Talk to Enhance Understanding (Heinemann, 2012), To Understand: New Horizons in Reading Comprehension (Heinemann, 2008), co-author of Comprehension Going Forward (Heinemann, 2011), co-author of Mosaic of Thought: The Power of Comprehension Strategy Instruction, 2^nd edition (Heinemann, 2007, 1^st edition, 1997) and author of Assessing Comprehension Thinking Strategies (Shell Educational Books, 2006) as well as numerous chapters for professional books and journals on the teaching of reading as well as education policy journals.

Arthur Hyde is the author or coauthor of the Heinemann titles Understanding Middle School Mathematics; Comprehending Math; Best Practice, Fourth Edition; and Mathwise. A professor of mathematics education at National-Louis University, he received its Excellence in Teaching award. While teaching high school mathematics in Philadelphia, he developed a variety of creative methods for teaching math. He also obtained a doctorate in curriculum and instruction from the University of Pennsylvania, where he later was Associate Director of Teacher Preparation. He continues to work frequently in elementary and middle school classrooms and conducts extensive professional development programs on mathematics and problem solving in Chicago and its surrounding school districts.