Sticky Math develops students’ conceptual understanding and procedural fluency without overwhelming their working memory.
Make connections. Deepen understanding. No “math” required.
Provide the math
With Sticky Math, there is often no math to “do.” Students examine the procedures they have done or will do to gain the conceptual understanding they need to apply procedures flexibly.
Add a representation
Often, too much emphasis is placed on procedural proficiency within a single, abstract symbolic representation. Rather than teaching different representations separately like a textbook, put them together so students can make connections.
Promote equity by explicitly making mathematical connections the task at hand rather than hoping students will implicitly see the connections through some other form of instruction.
Students build procedural fluency by making sense of problems and persevering in solving them (MP1) as they attend to precision (MP6) while looking for and making use of structure, reasoning abstractly and quantitatively, and looking for and express regularity in repeated reasoning (MP7, MP2 & MP8).
Choose a domain, browse the gallery, and pick one! Project it and save even more time.
A pencil. A couple of sticky notes. Great math instruction doesn’t get much cheaper than that.
Professional development one sticky at a time! Teachers learn to build procedural fluency from conceptual understanding in small, manageable pieces as they establish mathematics goals to focus learning and teach through multiple representations (NCTM, 2014).
Teachers build content knowledge and pedagogy as they review and use stickies with students. Sticky Math is a great first step in implementing tasks that promote reasoning and problem solving (NCTM, 2014).