The Five Practices in Practice: Successfully Orchestrating Mathematics Discussions in Your Middle School Classroom

• Key questions to set learning goals, identify high-level tasks, anticipate student responses, and develop targeted assessing and advancing questions that jumpstart productive discussion―before class begins 
• Video excerpts from real middle school classrooms that vividly illustrate the five practices in action and include built-in opportunities for you to consider effective ways to monitor students’ ideas, and successful approaches for selecting, sequencing, and connecting students’ ideas during instruction 
• "Pause and Consider" prompts that help you reflect on an issue―and, in some cases, draw on your own classroom experience―prior to reading more about it
• "Linking To Your Own Instruction" sections help you implement the five practices with confidence in your own instruction

The book and companion website provide an array of resources including planning templates, sample lesson plans and completed monitoring tools, and mathematical tasks. Enhance your fluency in the five practices to bring powerful discussions of mathematical concepts to life in your classroom.

"This books takes 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematics Discussions to the next level as readers experience what these practices look like in real mathematics classrooms in middle school. The authors specifically address the challenges one might face in implementing the classrooms by providing recommendations and concrete examples to avoid these challenges. This book is a must read for teachers who want to amplify their classroom implementation of the five practices."
Cathy Martin, Executive Director of Curriculum & Instruction
Denver Public Schools

Margaret (Peg) Smith is a Professor Emerita at University of Pittsburgh. Over the past three decades she has been developing research-based materials for use in the professional development of mathematics teachers. She has coauthored several books including Five Practices for Orchestrating Productive Discussions (with Mary Kay Stein), the middle and high school versions of the Taking Action series (with Melissa Boston, Fredrick Dillon, Stephen Miller, and Lynn Raith), and The 5 Practices in Practice: Successfully Orchestrating Mathematics Discussion in Your Classroom series (with Victoria Bill, Miriam Gameron Sherin, and Michael Steele). In 2006 she received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award given annually to honor outstanding faculty at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2009 she received the award for Excellence in Teaching in Mathematics Teacher Education from AMTE. In April 2019 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from NCTM.