EDUC 5893 – Secondary Mathematics Curriculum
Reading Report #4
Jessica Marks
February 28th, 2013
Suh, J. M., (2007). “Tying it all Together: Classroom Practices that Promote Mathematical Proficiency
for all Students”. Teaching Children Mathematics, Vol. 14, No. 3, p. 163-169.
This article presents an elementary mathematics teacher’s strategies for improving students’ mathematical
proficiency as defined by the National Research Council.
Summary: This article describes an in class case-study in which an elementary school teacher (Jennifer
M. Suh) sought to develop classroom practices that promoted students’ proficiency in mathematics as
characterized by their levels of conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, strategic competence,
adaptive reasoning, and productive disposition. This five-stranded approach to mathematical proficiency
is based on a 2001 publication from the National Research Council entitled “Adding it Up: Helping
Children Learn Mathematics”. Using this as a foundation, the author introduces five strategies for
promoting proficiency in the mathematics classroom, including: “modeling math meaningfully”, “math
curse”, “math happenings”, “convince me”, and “poster proofs”. “Modeling math meaningfully” is a
simple activity, in which students are asked to represent a given math concept symbolically, verbally,
physically (using manipulatives or pictures), and in real-life contexts. “Math curse” is a strategy used to
help students appreciate the value of mathematics and problem solving in everyday life. “Math
happenings” is an activity that helps students to see the connections between mathematics and the real
world, and finally “convince me” and “poster proofs” are strategies that can be used to help students
develop mathematical argumentation and deductive reasoning skills. Based on the author’s experience the
application of these strategies in the elementary mathematics classroom results in a significant
improvement in students’ disposition toward mathematics and has facilitated differentiation, especially
for English language learners in the mathematics classroom.
Evaluation: This article was very well written and informative. The classroom case-study approach not
only made the information presented more personalized, but also made it easy to relate to from the
perspective of a pre-service teacher. So often educational research becomes distanced from the school
setting and fails to account for the realities of the classroom, but this article is a great example of how an
elementary mathematics teacher has taken the initiative to bring educational research into her instruction.
By making use of the five-stranded mathematics proficiency model introduced by the National Research
Council, the author is able to simplify the overwhelming task of improving students’ proficiency in
mathematics into a few basic strategies. Of the many strategies introduced in the article, I believe that the
“Modeling Math Meaningfully” and “Math Happenings” will be most useful in my own classroom, since
they can be easily adapted for the middle or high school level. In fact, both could be used in the form of
entrance or exit slips or could serve as effective math warm-ups. The “Convince Me” and “Poster Proofs”
strategies will be equally beneficial in my classroom as they will allow me to access students’ thinking
while simultaneously improving their mathematical reasoning abilities. In fact, these strategies may also
have application in other subject areas including but not limited to science. To summarize, I think this
article is a very powerful one and the strategies presented within it are simple but meaningful and can be
easily applied in the classroom.
Connections to the Course/Implications for Teaching: Although it is written from the perspective on
an elementary math teacher, this article has great relevance to our secondary mathematics course and to
my own teaching. Promoting mathematical proficiency, in my opinion, should be a focus at all grade
levels. For this reason, I believe that the practices that the author introduces to increase conceptual
understanding, procedural fluency, strategic competence, adaptive reasoning, and productive disposition
at the elementary level have applications in all mathematics classrooms. In fact, I can already envision
some of the author’s strategies being used in my own teaching, whether it be at the middle or secondary
level. As the article suggests, I think the key to improving students’ mathematical proficiency is
convincing them that math has applications far beyond the classroom and that a given mathematical
problem can be approached from several angles. Having said that, I recognize that “the suggested
classroom activities are not secret ingredients for building mathematically proficient students”, they
simply provide means to strengthen students’ individual abilities in math, which in turn will improve their
mathematical proficiency (169). In other words, these strategies are not the solution to every single
problem in the math classroom, but they are certainly a step in the right direction in terms of improving
students’ attitudes toward math and their mathematical proficiencies.