Grades 6 - 8

 

CPM 

CPM began as a grant-funded mathematics project in 1989 to write textbooks to help students understand mathematics and support teachers who use these materials.  CPM Educational Program is now a nonprofit educational consortium of middle and high school teachers and university professors that offers a complete mathematics program for grades 6 through 12 designed to engage all students in learning mathematics through problem solving, reasoning and communication.

 

CPM Teaching strategies focus on how students best learn and retain mathematics.  Teaching strategies rely on the recommendations of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, and are based solidly on the methodological research in teaching mathematics.  The research-based principles that guide the courses are:

• Students should engage in problem-based lessons structured around a core idea.
• Guided by a knowledgeable teacher, students should interact in groups to foster mathematical discourse.
• Practice with concepts and procedures should be spaced over time; that is, mastery comes over time.

 

Important mathematical practices taken from the Wisconsin Model Academic Standards are deeply and seamlessly interwoven into the fabric of the daily lessons.

• Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.  
• Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
• Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
• Model with mathematics.
• Use appropriate tools strategically.
• Attend to precision.
• Look for and make use of structure.
• Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

 

The courses balance procedural fluency (algorithms and basic skills), deep understanding, strategic competence (problem solving) and adaptive reasoning (transference and extension)

 

 

This information and more can be found at 

cpm.org