Figuring Out Fluency

Procedural fluency is a critical, required component of balanced mathematics instruction. But it is often misunderstood. It is more than memorizing facts or procedures with the aim of answer getting, and it is more than understanding and being able to use one procedure or all the procedures" (NCTM, 2014). Yet, it is still often an area understood and taught in a way that honors memorization and rule following over sense-making. This leads to surface level "fake fluency." Approaches to fluency must shift, wherein students do learn specific procedures and algorithms, but more importantly, they learn when they need to use a procedure or algorithm and when they don't, as well as how to judge the reasonableness of their strategy and their answer. THAT is fluency. They have a toolbox of procedural strategies to choose from, that they have been explicitly taught, and they have the choice, knowledge, and power to apply what makes the most sense in a given problem. A classroom companion to the anchor book Fluency Figured Out, this book offers a menu of instruction-ready fluency support tools, instructional routines, activities, and games on the topic of whole number multiplication and division. It walks teachers through numeracy and thinking strategies they canexplicitly teach students to help them reason and operate on whole numbers with real fluency. The final chapters focus on assessing for fluency in whole number multiplication and division, and engaging families through letters, talking points, and ideas for families to help their child with multiplying and dividing whole numbers"--