The Common Core State Standards for Mathematical Practice asks students to look for and make use of structure. Hence, mathematics teacher educators need to prepare teachers to support students’ structural reasoning. In this article, we present tasks and rubrics designed and validated to characterize teachers’ structural reasoning for the purposes of professional development. Initially, tasks were designed and improved using interviews and small pilot studies. Next, we gave written structure tasks to over 600 teachers in two countries and developed and validated rubrics to categorize responses. Our work contributes to the preparation and support of mathematics teachers as they develop their own structural reasoning and their ability to help students develop structural reasoning.
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Stacy Musgrave, Cameron Byerley, Neil Hatfield, Surani Joshua, and Hyunkyoung Yoon
Sarah Stecher, Luke Wilcox, and Lindsey Gallas
The EFFL model empowers students to build strong conceptual understanding of mathematics through carefully designed, equity-minded activities that disrupt the traditional lecture-based classroom.
Alessandra King, Sophia Ouanes, and Claire Doh
Students and teachers enjoy exploring the boundaries between mathematics and art.
Gail Burrill, Joan Funderburk, Becky Byer, and Rachael Gorsuch
Classroom stories show how using technology to investigate the wage gap provided opportunities to develop students’ identities and agency and enabled a classroom culture of sharing and risk-taking.
T. Royce Olarte and Sarah A. Roberts
Teachers can implement a mathematics language routine within in-person/hybrid and remote instructional contexts.
Rachael H. Kenney, Michael Lolkus, and Yukiko Maeda
Mathematics teacher educators play a key role in supporting secondary mathematics teachers’ development of effective, research-based formative assessment (FA) practices. We used qualitative research synthesis as a tool to identify actionable recommendations for mathematics teacher educators as they work with teachers on FA practices in secondary classrooms. These recommendations can strengthen the research-based practices of mathematics teacher educators as they support teachers’ collections and uses of FA data to move student thinking forward in secondary mathematics. We share and discuss recommendations for mathematics teacher educators to connect pedagogical content knowledge of students, teaching, and curriculum to FA practices. We also highlight the usefulness of the qualitative synthesis method, meta-aggregation, for generating research-based connections between theory and practice in mathematics education.
Kathryn Early, K. Elizabeth Hammonds, Brea Ratliff, Mariya Rosenhammer, and W. Gary Martin
A high-leverage strategy first discussed more than 50 years ago, wait time has many benefits for both teachers and students yet is not used to its full potential. See how it can enhance your students’ mathematical discourse.
Sheldon P. Gordon and Michael B. Burns
We introduce variations on the Fibonacci sequence such as the sequences where each term is the sum of the previous three terms, the difference of the previous two, or the product of the previous two. We consider the issue of the ratio of the successive terms in ways that reinforce key behavioral concepts of polynomials.
Sarah Quebec Fuentes
Learn about strategies and tools to examine and improve your practice with respect to fostering equitable small-group, student-to-student discourse.
Lauren R. Holden, Yi-Yin (Winnie) Ko, Devon W. Maxwell, Connor A. Goodwin, Cheng-Hsien Lee, Jennifer E. Runge, and Elizabeth B. Beeman
One-Straight-Cut-Heart activities can help teachers support students’ engagement with geometry and can deepen students’ geometric reasoning.
