Mathematics

The Mathematics Department believes that every student is entitled to and deserves an excellent program of instruction in the content area that encourages each student to achieve at a high level.  We believe that students become confident “doers” of mathematics when they are engaged in high level cognitive demanding tasks. We believe that by asking students purposeful and demanding questions, we are assessing and advancing their learning without taking away the process of thinking from them. Ultimately, the goal of our department is to prepare all children for college and career readiness.

Mathematics can be personified as a progression of investigations which ultimately advances students’ development of sound mathematical concepts and ideas. As students build on their content knowledge, we encourage the following practices to be linked to their learning: making sense of problems and persevering in solving them, reasoning abstractly and quantitatively, constructing viable arguments or critiquing the reasoning of others, modeling with mathematics, using appropriate tools strategically, attending to precision, looking for and making use of structure and repeated reasoning.  The department has embraced and implemented a Conceptual-Based Model, which allows students time to explore mathematical concepts to promote academic rigor and maintain a high level of student discourse to concurrently develop conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, and problem solving skills.