Provide educators with the skills to create a student-centered mathematics classroom in which students connect mathematics to real-world ideas, communicate their mathematical thinking, and persevere in problem-solving.
Focus Area
Intentionally shifting to student-centered math practices requires buy-in from across your district, differentiated training for teachers of multiple subject areas, support for leaders, and a clear plan for how to measure success. Our professional learning plans are built from four key phases to support these changes from implementation to continuously improving lasting changes in practice.
Launching a student-centered math initiative starts with bringing your team together in-person to learn new concepts, language, and foundational practices around student-centered math practices. Launch experiences include the teachers and leaders who will work together toward the common goal of improving student-centered math instruction across the district.
Teachers and leaders work with a coach who has experience with student-centered math practices to select purposeful classroom tasks, anticipate common errors, and choose instructional routines that support the mathematical abilities of all students. Coaches use the Try-Measure-Learn approach to provide support personalized to the individual educator to work towards specific outcomes in the school and classroom.
Leaders build their capacity to enact changes by understanding what success looks like in the classroom and use data to make informed professional learning decisions. Learning Walks are a non-evaluative collaborative experience that brings leaders together to observe math classrooms, acknowledge student-centered math practices, and create a tailored learning plan to support teachers.
Bring together the educators who will be enacting changes in math classrooms at collaborative Virtual Workshops throughout the school year. Throughout your student-centered math initiative, teachers will work together to choose outcomes to work towards, create actionable next steps, and build a plan to reflect on student results for a lasting change in practice.
Using Visual Representations to Support Math Reasoning
Developing Conceptual Understanding in a Student-Centered Classroom (PK-3)
Humanizing Math Class to Create Positive Learning Experiences
Getting Started Planning Activities with the 5 Practices
Planning for Learning with Anticipating and Monitoring
Facilitating Discourse with Selecting, Sequencing, and Connecting
Promoting Language Use in Math: Making Sense of Tasks
Promoting Language Use in Math: Cultivating Conversations
Outcomes are the measurable goal of all of our learning experiences. Each experience works towards an outcome that makes the change in practice sustainable and impactful for students and teachers. For Student-Centered Math, we focus on helping educators achieve the below outcomes.
Outcome: I create an environment that encourages students to communicate their mathematical thinking with each other.
Outcome: I engage and support students in lessons that promote reasoning and problem-solving.
Outcome: I support students in developing positive beliefs about math and about themselves as mathematicians.
Outcome: I facilitate mathematical discourse that deepens student understanding.
The typical arc to implement a change in practice can be one to three years, depending on your district’s goals and size. Our comprehensive learning plans incorporate in-person, virtual, group, and self-directed learning experiences throughout the full school year to help educators build upon previous learnings and turn strategies into results in the classroom. Our team works with your district to create a learning plan that’s tailored to your district’s strategic plan, and includes a mix of learning experiences backed by research and focused on desired outcomes.
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