MathVIDS Teaching Plans

Purpose

The MathVIDS Teaching Plans provide educators examples of how the MathVIDS instructional strategies can be integrated to teach particular K-5 mathematical concepts. These plans are meant to stimulate the reader's thinking and to provide further contextualized models for how the MathVIDS instructional strategies can be implemented effectively.

Organization

Mulitple teaching plans are provided for each mathematical concept, including concrete level, representational level, and abstract level plans. Concrete level plans are available for all mathematical concepts. Representational and abstract level plans are available based on their appropriateness for the developmental/age level of students. For example, One-to-One Correspondence has concrete and representational level plans but not an abstract level plan because this is a kindergarten level concept.

Each teaching plan is organized according to four phases of instruction: 1) Strategies that Develop Students' Initial Acquistion of the Concept/Skill; 2) Practice Strategies that Develop Proficiency; 3) Evaluation of Student Learning; 4) Maintenance Strategies. An introduction section describes necessary prerequisite skills, instructional objectives included, and important tips. Video that shows teachers explicitly modeling the concepts/skill is also available in each teaching plan. Teaching plans also can be downloaded and printed by clicking on the "download printable version" link directly below the menu bar for each teaching plan.

For each strategy, except for Explicit Teacher Modeling, one or two examples of how that strategy might be used to teach the overall plan's concept/skill are provided. The plan's overall concept/skill is divided into multiple instructional objectives for the Phase 1 instructional strategy, Explicit Teacher Modeling. For each instructional objective, a description of how a teacher can model that objective is provided in a step-by-step fashion. Video examples of a teacher implementing Explicit Teacher Modeling are included for most of these instructional objectives. The developers of MathVIDS chose to emphasize Explicit Teacher Modeling in these ways for two primary reasons. One, explicit instruction has received the most research support in terms of its effectiveness as an instructional practice for students with learning difficulties. Second, many teachers may not be totally familiar with the mathematics they teach. Providing teachers with a step-by-step "break-down" of a specific instructional objective can assist them to better understand how the concept/skill can be broken down into learnable parts (assists students with learning difficulties) and teachable components (helps novice teachers represent the concept/skill appropriately).

Teaching plans can be accessed in four ways, by mathematical concept (Place Value, Whole Number Operations, Fractions), by level of understanding (Concrete, Representational, Abstract), by Virginia Standards of Learning, and by NCTM Standards.

Videos

Videos are provided in the Phase 1 section of the teaching plans (Initial Acquisition) for the instructional strategy Explicit Teacher Modeling. Videos can be viewed in two ways. They can be viewed directly from the text that describes how a teacher can model the particular instructional objective according to sequenced steps. Video clips demonstrate a teacher who implements one or more of the sequenced steps. A second way videos can be viewed is by clicking the "Videos" button at the top of the plan. This will take you to a section where all of the videos for that plan can be viewed according to instructional objective.