Max has distilled the Math Forum's years of experience, thousands of hours of classroom observation, and abundant creativity into a brisk book full of practice and theory.
Dan Meyer, international speaker on mathematics education and one of Tech & Learning’s “30 Leaders of the Future”
Max Ray and his Math Forum colleagues have crafted a powerful guide to bringing the Standards for Mathematics Practice to life in our classrooms. Packed with real classroom experiences and easy-to-adopt activities, this book will help every teacher of mathematics overcome the instructional obstacles we face when trying to engage students in problem solving, reasoning and communication.
Steve Leinwand, American Institutes for Research and author of Accessible Mathematics
Powerful Problem Solving draws attention to a greater understanding of how to integrate the Standards for Mathematical Practice into daily teaching to ensure that students develop critical thinking and problem solving skills. Helpful features in this book include learning through listening, noticing and wondering, seeing the big picture, engaging student’s number sense through guessing, looking for structure, abstracting and modeling. This book is every teacher’s roadmap for the development of mathematically proficient problem solvers.
Suzanne Mitchell, past president, NCTM
Whether you read this book from front to back or simply dive into chapters that address the needs of your students, you will find it practical, understandable, and enlightening. Don't wait another minute—dive into it!
Sue O'Connell, author of Putting the Practices Into Action
This is an extremely useful book full of ideas and strategies to promote "powerful problem solving" for all students. I have begun to use the "I Notice, I Wonder" strategy, as presented in chapter 4, in my own classroom (grades 5–8) and have received positive feedback from my mathematics students. I recommend that this book be a part of every teacher’s "tool chest."
Shelli Casler-Failing, Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School
