Customer Reviews

Designing Effective Mathematics Instruction: A Direct Instruction Math (3rd Edition)

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Designing Effective Mathematics Instruction offers brilliant solutions to most of the problems that your students might be having. It includes all the most important mathematics topics from kindergarten through fractions and "pre-algebra." The chapters discuss various mathematics topics in some depth, providing a broad-based conceptual understanding as well as specific, practical suggestions for teaching procedures. Specific skills are referenced to "formats," which are wonderfully clear scripts for teaching the specific procedure, concept, or principle. Scripts range in degree of structure from totally structured, with each step taught and guided, to less structured. The less structured scripts (and accompanying worksheets) would be given to students *after* they had mastered the structured formats.

I have given chapters from this book to my teachers, who universally report success in teaching the most difficult topics. I daresay that this book will solve at least 95% of your students' mathematics problems. Even if you are already highly successful teaching math, the book will help broaden your understanding of some of the relations between different tasks and how to explain them in clear, student-friendly language. For example, the discussion of story problems has a fascinating analysis of the different kinds of problems and how to approach them in a way that students can understand.

Our students surge ahead with the help of this book. Buy it!

As an elementary Special Day Class teacher and Resource Specialist I used thetext "Designing Effective Mathematics Instruction" countless times. I was constantly facedwith gaps in student math skills, confused algorithms, and lack of functionalskills such as telling time and using money.Using and adapting the materials in this book allowed me to focus myinstruction and maximize student progress. In special education, "individualized" is the main principle. Using this book,one can be equipped to assess and design math instruction which is finelydetailed and suited to individual needs. Yes, I can think of a chapter or two that ought to be written and enhance itsutility, but they only support and further its basic intent.66 dollars? Yes, a hefty price on a teacher's salary. But few books on your desk willbecome so dog-eared.

I would never again begin to attempt to teach elementary math without this book on my desk. If you are fed up with the "new-new" math and want to find out the clearest and simplest way to help children learn basic computational skills this book is just what you need. This text would be especially helpful to homeschoolers who want consistent language that helps children understand place value when they do arithemetic, or fractions when they are learning to manipulate them. This text would also be needed by teachers whose college training only prepared them to engage their students in interesting math activities but never showed how to explain addition and subtraction of unlike fractions, or how to effectively organize math facts memorization, or even any strategies for solving word problems. All these and many more are covered in helpful detail in this text. There are invaluable tips for correcting common errors, or better yet-how to avoid them. All explanations support each other in a way that helps students tie new learning to the necessary prior knowledge. I have used this as a text in curriculum methods courses in three universities and most students come away with the feeling that this book is an incredible reference book that they wish to keep handy throughout their teaching careers.

In an age of fads--fuzzy math, constructivism, whole language--that waste our children's time to learn (and make the faddist authors rich)--this book is both fresh air and hope. It will teach NEW teachers what their ed professors refused to teach (or don't know how to teach). And it will show parents what real math instruction is.

Whatever (ill-informed) reviewer wrote, "...today we are on the cusp of an age where thinking, and not the rote memorization of isolated rules and procedures," obviously has not read this book--which is ALL about higher-order thinking! The same reviewer writes,"...this book could set us back 75 years." Right! Back when math was taught by people like Einstein.

Stein, Silbert & Carnine deserve medals for bravery--fighting against the nonsense that "math educators" dish up.

This book has been a Godsend for me and many other teachers who are more interested in "teaching" than in following the latest fad. Let us hope that more teachers read it.

My children were attending a charter school that was using Direct Instruction Math so I bought this book to see if was similar. It was the exact same math. This type of math is very unconventional and very repetitive. The children in the charter school after three years of using this math did worse than the public schools in the same town. I taught at the school for one year and found the Direct Instruction Math designed by S. Engleman and I had to pull my kids from the school because I could see that this type of mathematics was going to cause them to be way behind other children when it came to standardized testing, it sure enough the kids at the school did not do well this past year.