By engaging educators in solving low-floor, high-ceiling tasks, Building Excellent Educators offers PD experiences that develop specialized teacher content knowledge and increase understanding of effective instructional practices for teaching mathematics.
How might we build excellent educators who use effective instructional practices and strong content knowledge to grow powerful mathematicians?
We use principles of adult education to support teachers and school leaders in their thinking about:
How learners make sense of mathematics
The characteristics of math tasks that promote inquiry, justification, and sensemaking
Productive discourse in a mathematics classroom
How mathematical representations, manipulatives, and technology support learners in uncovering big ideas
Strategies for improving numeracy across your school
Using mathematics standards and assessmentto ensure curricular alignment between grades
Deepening teacher content knowledge for particularly challenging topics such as early years numeracy,fractions, and proportional reasoning.
Sample Workshop Options for Leadership
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This workshop will focus on noticing student thinking rather than teacher moves. What we notice in classrooms is shaped by what we value and know, and it drives our leadership decisions. By focusing attention on what students are doing and how they are thinking, we can often tell much more about the depth of student understanding and the level of expectation teachers set. Today’s students must develop such 21st century skills as thinking creatively, working with others, reasoning effectively, and solving challenging problems while thinking about rigorous content in modern curricula. Being able to focus on student actions and interactions and consider how cognitively productive they are will help observers support teachers focus on what really matters in their classrooms.
Audience: classroom evaluators, department chairpersons, teacher leaders
On-site or online
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This workshop will engage leaders in facilitating productive conversations in which all voices are heard. A focus on how status issues that are present in all teams hinder productive conversation and how leaders can mitigate status if they attend to it using structures for discourse. By considering how discourse protocols enable safe conversations about challenging topics, participants will experience the power of rich conversations and plan for how to lead one in their schools. They will also consider how the same types of protocols can be used in classrooms to facilitate important conversation among students.
Audience: building and school administrators, department chairpersons, teacher leaders
On-site or online
Sample Job-Embedded Options for Leadership
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This PD opportunity will engage teacher teams in aligning standards with curricular resources, writing learning targets for each unit, and determining appropriate assessments for the learning targets. Alternatively, Heidi can do curriculum and assessment work on behalf of the school with input and guidance to ensure alignment with the school’s goals.
Audience: curriculum coordinators or k-12 grade level teams
On-site or online
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This PD opportunity will engage school leaders in considering what cognitively productive classrooms look and sound like and then in walking through classrooms to observe trends. Using what we learn from the observations, we will consider areas of strength and opportunities for growth which will help form leadership decisions that can support improved instruction.
Audience: administrator or teacher leaders
On-site only
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This PD opportunity will support school leaders in writing a professional learning community plan for their school. The purpose of PLCs is to engage teachers in reflection about standards, planning, and
assessment with a focus on student work to inform instruction. Since each school is unique and has different schedules and structures, PLCs cannot be considered in a one-size-fits-all approach. For example, one school has 8-week cycles to support interdisciplinary learning labs, with teachers using different protocols each week that focus on planning, rubrics, tasks, and student work during each lab.
Other schools use unit-based cycles with a focus on the curriculum and standards, the end-of-unit assessment, and student work analysis. Effective instructional coaching for individual teachers may be incorporated into a PLC plan.Audience: administrator or department chairpersons
On-site or online
Sample Workshop Offerings for Mathematics
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Many teachers have taught mathematics using curriculum aligned to current understanding of effective math instructional practices but have never had the chance to learn mathematics using those practices or to connect what research says with those practices. In this workshop, teachers will explore instructional strategies that have been shown to enhance student learning of mathematics, first by having mathematical experiences and then by discussing how those experiences are shaped by research. Topics under consideration will include the role of mathematical discourse in student learning, how justification and generalization help build conceptual
understanding, and the characteristics of rich tasks that lead to deeper learning. Teachers will consider these topics in relation to their own classrooms and leaders will consider how to support teachers as they further incorporate research-based practices into their daily work with students.Audience: k-12 mathematics teachers and leaders
2-day workshop
On-site only
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Students frequently struggle to develop an understanding of fractions, in part because they fail to connect the manipulation of mathematical symbols to visual representations. Many teachers have never had the opportunity to learn about fractions with the visual representations that current curricular resources rely on, or to consider how different representations can be used as student conceptual understanding develops across grade levels.
Audience: teachers of Grades 2 – HS
2-day workshop
On-site or a collection of online sessions
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“Number sense cannot be taught, it must be caught” – Christine Tondevold
Researchers have shown that even babies have an innate sense of number that grows along a developmental progression through experiences with manipulatives, visual representations, and play. Number sense that young children develop prepares learners for future success in mathematics.
In this workshop, teachers will have experiences to remind you about how complex it feels to learn basic numeracy skills. We will discuss the developmental progression of number sense that may help teachers understand how to support individual learners in their personal next steps, and build a beginning understanding of how number talks can be used as a routine in classrooms at every level to support flexibility and fluency with numbers.
Audience: teachers of EY through Grade 8
2-day workshop
On-site or a collection of online sessions
Sample Job-Embedded Offerings for Mathematics
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This PD opportunity supports teachers to take what they learned during a prior workshop into their classrooms as they implement new learning with their students. The teachers will develop a student-focused question, such as, “What representations do my students rely on and how can we expand their repertoire?” or “How does the task I assigned promote conceptual understanding and how might we enhance the task?” to think about with the facilitator prior to the lesson. The facilitator will then observe student interactions during the lesson and coach the teacher following the lesson. If several
teachers from the same school would like additional support, we can use a half-day session to collaboratively answer a shared question by planning a lesson, observing its enactment in one teacher’s class and debriefing what we each notice about student reasoning during the lesson.Audience: teachers who attended weekend workshops
On-site only
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This PD opportunity is for teachers who are thinking about challenges they face or examining different ways to improve their instruction. Teachers determine their own “problem of practice” and have an opportunity to work one-on-one with a coach to reflect on the current state of the problem, make a plan they’ll enact in the classroom, be observed or gather other evidence, and debrief what they’ve learned. This cycle can be repeated multiple times for continuing improvement.
Audience: individual teachers or teacher teams
