Welcome to Local District South Mathematics website.  Our mission is to provide a quality, rigorous and meaningful educational experience for ALL students.  We plan to accomplish this through an inquiry-based mathematical experience that we, in Local District South call, Mathematics Workshop Model. The three parts of the Mathematics Workshop Model are described below.

1. Math Warm Ups: A daily math routine where students can gather in a specific area to do math, think about math and practice their speaking and listening skills. Math Warm Ups are great mini lessons to get students engaged in math.  Math Warm Ups allow for pre-teaching, reteaching or previewing upcoming skills, concepts and big ideas. Math Warm Ups are intended to be 10-20 minutes long. The role of the student is to explain their reasoning and put those Standards for Mathematical Practices in motion.  The role of the teacher is to facilitate intentional student discourse and model student thinking. Other major roles of the teacher are to listen attentively to students, model their thinking and confer with students to advance their understanding of strategies, computations, and number sense.

2. Problem Solving: During this part, students get to problem solving right after the Warm Up in the math instructional block.  Context plays a crucial role in the development of Numeracy for students.  It is important to build Conceptual Understanding and Fact Fluency from a rich contextualized problem.  During the Problem Solving part of the Mathematics Workshop, it is a recommended to use the Three-Read Protocol to give access to all learners.  The Three-Read protocol is a scaffolding strategy and eventually the responsibility should be given to students to practice this strategy on their own. During Problem Solving it is a good idea to allow students to work independently for 5-10 minutes and then work in pairs or triads to come up with as many strategies as possible. If a traditional textbook is being used as the primary curriculum, it is suggested that teachers use the problem solving tasks at the end of the lesson before all the computational problems.  This is also known as “Flipping the Textbook.” Problem solving tasks should be “Must-Dos” and computational tasks should be “May-Dos”.

3. Share Out: After all the great strategies and ideas that students developed during problem solving , it is time to highlight them.  Share Out is part three of the Mathematics Workshop. Students need to construct viable arguments for the work they were engaged in.  During the Share Out, it is recommended that students come to the gathering area to discuss their strategies used during problem solving. There are several ways to conduct a Share Out; Pairs of students can share their work with the class and explain their reasoning, the teacher can lead a discussion using student work, or the teacher can conduct a Gallery Walk.  Gallery Walk is where students display their work and everyone walks around the room examining and commenting on each other’s work. Students benefit tremendously from the Share Out because they are interacting with other’s ideas and they begin to borrow new, more efficient strategies. 

The Mathematics Workshop Model is our Local District South initiative.  Our theme throughout the Mathematics Work Shop is “Student Discourse”. Student discourse will allow for ALL learners to have access to a rigorous and quality mathematical experience. Student discourse is one of the most successful strategies to promote Equity for ALL!