Mathematics

This article describes one mathematics professional development program designed to support all K-5 students' engagement in productive mathematical discussions, in particular emergent multilingual learners.

Malzahn, K., Sztajn, P., & Heck, D. (October, 2019). Talk is the ticket to teaching math to English learners. The Learning Professional, 40(5).

In this paper, we analyze a PD design, examining its activities and the sequencing of professional learning tasks. We use a theoretical framework typically used in pre-service teacher education to understand the design of one PD program. Our overarching goal is to theorize about how to design PD and sequence professional learning tasks for practicing teachers.

In this chapter, we use the Framework for Teaching Practice (Grossman, et al., 2009) as a conceptual tool for analzying the design of professional development. Although initially developed to examine the education of prospective teachers, we contend that this framework is appropriate for analyzing and supporting the design of professional development. The framework consists of three elements: decompositions, representations, and approximations of practice.

Many mathematics teachers agree that engaging students in high quality discourse is important for their conceptual learning, but successfully promoting such discourse in elementary classrooms—with attention to the needs of every learner—can be a challenge. Activating Math Talk tackles this challenge by bringing practical, math-specific, productive discourse techniques that are applicable to any lesson or curriculum.

A teacher uses formative assessment interviews to uncover evidence of students’ understandings and to plan targeted instruction in a mathematics intervention class. Authors present an example of a student interview, a discussion of the benefits and challenges of conducting interviews, and actionable suggestions for implementing them.

MacVicar, T. J., Brodesky, A. R., and Fagan, E. R. (2021). The power of interviewing students. Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching PK-12, 114(6), 436–444.