Welcome to another new school year! The start of a new school year is a busy and exciting time for teachers. From building your classroom routines, to planning instruction, and fostering relationships with your students, there is a lot to do!
Big Ideas Learning can support you in these important tasks. Whether you are new to the classroom, changing grades, or a veteran teacher, consider these ideas for starting the year strong with your Big Ideas Learning math instruction and building a classroom community of mathematical thinkers.
In a Big Ideas Learning classroom, teachers utilize our research-based lessons to drive their daily instruction and meet the needs of all learners in their classes. From Kindergarten to Algebra 2, students experience a consistent lesson design with a balanced approach to rigor. By beginning each lesson with an exploration, Big Ideas Learning lessons invite students to explore new topics and develop their conceptual understanding. These rich activities are followed by scaffolded lessons, which allow for modeling, practice, use of precise mathematical language, student discussion and collaboration, building procedural fluency, and application to real-world scenarios.
When you look around a Big Ideas Learning classroom, learning targets and success criteria for each lesson are visible for students and explicitly called out. Teachers may post them on their weekly or daily agendas, digital whiteboards, or online learning spaces. By making learning objectives clearly visible, students are empowered to take ownership of their learning. For example, students can reflect on their learning through embedded self-assessments throughout each lesson that tie back to the specific learning targets of that lesson. Additionally, teachers are often seen consulting their teaching edition textbooks in print or digitally to review our co-author notes for valuable insights into the lesson content and common student misconceptions.
You'll see a variety of materials students can use in their learning, such as their physical student editions, manipulatives, digital math tools, extension activities, mini- whiteboards or other shared writing spaces. You will see key vocabulary for the lesson displayed on word walls, in the hands of students using the lesson vocabulary cards, or displayed digitally through the multi-language glossary.
When you walk into a Big Ideas Learning classroom, depending on what part of the lesson the class is working on, there are several things you might see. The start of the lesson is purposefully designed to engage students to be active participants in their learning. This might look like an activity where students are in groups at their tables or around the room using whiteboards, manipulatives, or even themselves to model and explore mathematical concepts, like standing on a number line to compare different values. Later in the lesson, the whole class could be reviewing the steps of a new process together and then taking some time to try a few questions on their own to check their understanding.
For classrooms that have digital devices available, students might be working with virtual tools like graphs and digital counters to model and visualize the new content they are learning. Sometimes this might also look like small groups working on or rotating through different activities like real-world problems, formative self-assessments on the learning targets of the lesson, games or activities to help them master procedural fluency, or online skills practice for targeted intervention or extension.
On most days in a Big Ideas Learning math classroom, students are active participants in and contributors to their learning experience. This means a Big Ideas Learning classroom will be, well, loud!
Partner or group work is built into each lesson, so you will often hear multiple discussions going on around the room. Students will be turning and talking, discussing, debating, and helping each other throughout all portions of the lesson. Consult our co-author notes for each lesson for discussion starter prompts. As your students discuss the math at hand, you will gather valuable feedback to utilize during the lesson examples and formative checks.
Provide students with sentence starters like these to encourage them to share their thinking:
Encourage a growth mindset in students with the following prompts:
Big Ideas Learning lessons introduce and encourage the use of key vocabulary, so you will also hear precise mathematical language, from kindergarteners naming triangles and circles to algebra students solving for unknown variables.
A Big Ideas Learning classroom feels like a safe space for students to explore the world of math, ask questions, challenge their thinking, and make mistakes. Students and teachers alike feel excited when the “light bulb” moment goes off and students understand the real-world connections. You can tell you are a part of a Big Ideas Learning classroom because students are actively engaged in their learning, teachers are guiding students through their thinking and mastery of the lesson learning targets, and all feel a sense of engagement in the wonder of mathematics!
About Us: Founded in 2008, by renowned math textbook author, Dr. Ron Larson, Big Ideas Learning is a leading publisher of content-rich educational programs. Our programs provide a cohesive, coherent, and rigorous mathematics curriculum to empower teachers and support student learning from kindergarten through high school. We have over 35 years of experience focusing exclusively on mathematics in the classroom.