Figuring Out Math Fluency: Going Beyond Basic Facts

Do you have students who pull out a calculator for 99 + 45? Or who try to apply the standard algorithm for 9.9 + 3.5? There are more efficient—and even mental--strategies to do problems like these quickly (without a cumbersome process). But if students don’t know these strategies, they aren’t yet engaged in real fluency. They haven’t moved past focusing on just speed and rote procedures and developed flexible, nimble, and efficient computational thinking based on conceptual understanding.

In this session, John SanGiovanni and Jennifer Bay-Williams will explore beliefs and practices that stand in the way of fluency, as well as others that provide strong access to fluency. Along the way, they will share significant reasoning strategies, “automaticities”, and many activities for quality fluency practice that will help you develop versatile and confident mathematical thinkers.

Participants will
• Deepen understanding of mathematical fluency and what it means for equitable teaching and learning
• Examine facts and fallacies related to procedural fluency
• Explore significant, generalizable strategies for fluency with whole numbers, fractions, decimals, and integers
• Consider automaticities beyond basic facts
• Connect quality practice to procedural fluency