_{Chris Mikles, Director of Professional Development, chrismikles@cpm.org}

Tips of the Week have been expanded to include Tips of the Week for Phase 2 – Instructional Strategies Workshops and another set of Tips of the Week for Phase 3 – Assessment Workshops. They are in the editing stage and should be ready soon. You will be able to find them at our website with the Phase 1 –First Year Implementation tips, as well as the student and parent Tips of the Week.

This is the time of the year to get parents on board with CPM, especially for schools that are using CPM and/or student-centered classrooms for the first time. Please be transparent with students and parents as you start this new venture. Give them reasons for doing math this way. From your Teacher Edition,

Benefits of teamwork include:

• Working in a team provides opportunities to see and discuss multiple approaches to problems.
• Students experience greater learning gains when they have multiple opportunities to explain their thinking and discuss ideas, as supported by the research of Glasser and others.
• Interacting with others gives students the opportunity to become skilled collaborators, which will serve them well in many career paths.

A friend recommended reading Balancing the Equation by Larson and Kanold. There is a lot of good information in here especially for parents and administrators. One example of a quote for parents from chapter four is, “The first thing you should notice is that your child is expected to master skills and procedures. But that is no longer sufficient. In a world that puts a premium on the ability to interpret and solve problems, your child also must be able to explain why those procedures work and when they should apply them. This is called strategic competence.”

Another quote for parents is the one I think most educators tell parents in some form or other. “You might believe that your child can become a better athlete or a better musician by exerting effort, responding to instruction and feedback (learning from mistakes), trying different strategies and practicing. Learning mathematics is no different.” The book has answers for some of the most common questions that parents have about Common Core. There are comments about the role of the parent in their child’s math education. There are also tips in the book about how parents can help their child.

This summer we held our second Residential Workshop (RW). This is a  five-day workshop that encompasses the whole eight-day workshop series. It has been held in Utah for the last two years. We have teachers who are in rural areas where there are no CPM workshops being offered, teachers from overseas, and teachers who, for whatever reason, could not make it to the CPM workshop near them. For some Utah teachers, this was also their workshop. Because CPM believes in supporting teachers all year round (newsletters, Tips of the Week, visits) we want to continue support for these teachers also. So we will be holding webinars every six weeks or so. Since most of the content of the eight days has been covered, we will be asking How is this going? as well as reminding teachers of things to pay attention to throughout the year. We will review some content also, as the week of the Residential Workshop was very intense. This is what we did last year and I think the participants appreciated talking about issues.