Overview of Workshops

Our professional development opportunities are for teachers, coaches, specialists, curriculum developers, and anyone interested in developing lessons and pedagogies that prioritize habits of mathematics. Course participants will actively engage in doing, making sense of, and reflecting upon mathematics and teaching. Participants will leave with strategies and structures for building classroom culture, daily routines that promote habits of math, ideas for assessing and giving feedback, and a community of teachers also working to incorporate habits of math into their teaching.

Upcoming Workshops

There are currently no upcoming workshops open to the public. If you are interested in inquiring about a personalized workshop for your team, email us at avery.pickford@gmail.com.

Recent Workshops

Tinker and Invent

Students spend most of their time in school answering other people’s questions and their own wondering is often restricted to “when are we going to use this?” Join us in exploring strategies such as “what-if-not” and the “Invent Your Own Project”, designed to pique student curiosity and help students ask their own mathematical questions. Come to this workshop to learn about ways to integrate student-posed problems and structures into your existing curriculum.

Constructing & Critiquing Mathematical Arguments

Constructing viable arguments and critiquing the reasoning of others (CCSS.MP3) is also a call to action to expand our definition of proof from a process generally limited to Geometry classes to the broader, more social mathematical habit of mind of "convincing your skeptical peers," a habit that can be practiced in every math classroom each and every day. In this course, we will share, reflect upon, and develop classroom structures, tasks, teacher moves, and assessments to help make this value visible and effective in helping student sensemaking.

Modeling in Math for Experienced Teachers

We make enormous promises to our students that mathematics models the world they live in. Unfortunately, most textbook word problems look nothing like that world; these exercises are also a far cry from modeling as it’s practiced by mathematicians. Instead of, for example, attempting to formulate, analyze, and validate a metric to predict viral YouTube videos, students spend time plugging numbers into equations about cannonball flight paths. The adoption of the CCSS is a terrific opportunity to redefine mathematical modeling and consider what it means for our students to engage in the modeling process in our classrooms. This course will use modeling as a medium for pondering teaching practices, including how to create and facilitate tasks that are perplexing, challenging, and relevant. We will discuss cross-curricular opportunities, problems that could range in length from minutes to weeks, and projects with low bars for entry and non-existent ceilings. Throughout the week course participants will actively engage in doing, making sense of, and reflecting upon mathematics and teaching. Teachers will also work collaboratively with other participants to develop materials to be used in their own classrooms.