ESPA Workshops Home Descriptions Register Prof. Dev. The ESPA workshops developed by the New Jersey Mathematics Coalition are designed to present key instructional activities that address the NJ Mathematics Standards and the ESPA Content Clusters. Teachers who engage students in such activities, and the mathematics they involve, will automatically be preparing students for the kinds of questions that appear on the state tests. To underscore this point, sample ESPA questions are explicitly discussed as they relate to the workshop activities. Problem-solving and literature connections are also embedded in all workshops.
Participants begin by completing a short survey, then graph and analyze data.
They discuss key characteristics of different kinds of graphs, such as pictographs, bar graphs, pie charts, line plots, Venn diagrams, and glyphs. The steps for gathering, presenting and interpreting data are viewed as key components in the process of inquiry. Strategies are suggested for helping students understand the concepts of mean, median, and mode. Participants begin by discussing uses for numbers in real life, and the relative magnitude of numbers in different situations. A hundred-grid is used to focus on finding patterns in numbers, doing mental math, and developing place value concepts to 100.