By Tonia J. Land, Corey Drake, Molly Sweeney, Natalie Franke, and Jennifer M. Johnson

Choose numbers to maximize learning for all your students.

The enduring challenge for every teacher is providing individual and responsive learning experiences for every student. Factor in other parts of the educator’s mission—aligning teaching with content and practice standards, providing worthwhile tasks for class participation and discussion, assessing mathematical understanding and progress—and the challenge is even greater. Transforming the Task with Number Choice presents a uniquely powerful tool to accomplish these goals and more.

By choosing and sequencing productive arrays of numbers for problems, you can—

• meet the needs and strengths of individual learners with accessible, equitable, and differentiated math;
• address multiple content and practice standards;
• create rich, worthwhile tasks with multiple entry points;
• provide opportunities for students to vary their strategies and use the properties of operations;
• shift students’ focus from merely calculating answers to examining number relationships;
• assess students’ abilities and monitor their understanding.

Choosing numbers that are “just right” is hard, but Transforming the Task with Number Choice supports and guides you by offering—

• strategies for aligning problem-solving tasks with students’ skills to build their understanding;
• examples of and strategies for using number choice to address a variety of Common Core (or other) content and practice standards;
• samples of work illustrating how students respond to different number choices;
• advice on how to focus on number choice within curricular materials; and
• tools for getting started and assessing students’ work, including downloadable blackline masters at nctm.org/more4u.