Sharon Rendon, Director of Professional Learning, sharonrendon@cpm.org
When teachers are pressed on all sides and time is at a premium, the first part of the professional practice that seems to disappear is the commitment to planning. The planning routine may too quickly become a glance through the teacher notes and the problems, but not an investment of concentrated planning time. Do not let that become the case for you this year. Set aside time to intentionally plan, preferably with colleagues, at least once a week.
The CPM Phase Two workshop spends a significant amount of time looking at how to incorporate different instructional strategies into lessons through the lense of planning. The CPM Phase 2 Lesson Planning Guide (gdoc) is a good tool to support your efforts toward intentional planning. This resource gives you space to record the questions you plan to purposefully use to assess and advance student thinking as you are circulating. Start with an attainable goal to collaboratively plan at least one lesson every two weeks with your colleagues.
Facilitating discussion about the complex tasks found in CPM textbooks requires a commitment to preparing for the conversation. The book, Five Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions, by Smith and Stein, is another great resource for supporting you in this work of planning. “The premise underlying the book is that the identification and use of a codified set of practices can make student-centered approaches to mathematics instruction accessible to and manageable for more teachers.” You can think of the five practices, (anticipating, monitoring, selecting, sequencing, and connecting) as a roadmap for the whole team conversations you want to conduct based on the identified math goal for the lesson. These five practices occur both before and during instruction.
In the May newsletter, John Hayes, a CPM coach and Teacher Leader, shared an article, Purposefully Planning a CPM Lesson (PDF). I would encourage you to reread it and spend some time reviewing the six steps for planning that he has found success with in his work with teachers.
Make it a goal to stay committed to the practice of planning this year, even when time gets short.