Beyond Answers: Exploring Mathematical Practices with Young Children

Beyond Answers: Exploring Mathematical Practices with Young Children, author Mike Flynn provides teachers with a clear and deep sense of the Standards for Mathematical Practice and shares ideas on how to best implement them in K-2 classrooms.

Each chapter is dedicated to one of the eight common core standards. Using examples from his own teaching and vignettes from many other K-2 teachers, Flynn does the following:

• Invites you to break the cycle of teaching math procedurally
• Demonstrates what it means for children to understand not just do math
• Explores what it looks like when young children embrace the important behaviors espoused by the practices
• The book's extensive collection of stories from K-2 classroom provides readers with glimpses of classroom dialogue, teacher reflections, and examples of student work.
• Focus questions at the beginning of each vignette help you analyze the examples and encourage further reflection.

Beyond Answers is a wonderful resource that can be used by individual teachers, study groups, professional development staff, and in math methods courses.

Mike Flynn is the director of Mathematics Leadership Programs at Mount Holyoke College and runs the Master of Arts in Mathematics Teaching program. Prior to this work, he taught second grade at the William E. Norris Elementary School in Southampton, Massachusetts, for fourteen years. He is the 2008 Massachusetts Teacher of the Year, a recipient of the 2009 National Education Association Foundation Horace Mann Award for Teaching Excellence, and a 2010 recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics Teaching.