Discourse-Driven Mathematics Seminar Series
We provide seminar-style trainings to meet the specific needs of our client districts. The common threads throughout all our seminars is a focus on building urgency for change among participants, focusing common practices on a set of instructional principles, directly increasing content knowledge and providing low-prep, easily replicable methods that teachers can follow to implement new skills immediately upon returning to their classrooms. A representative list of recent seminars and their descriptions are below.
Rationalized Mathematics Seminar Options
Show it! Explain it!: How to Academically Articulate the What, Why and How for the Work Students Already Show!
Description: As new testing requirements have stretched students’ understanding of mathematics from accurate computation to explicit explanation, many students find themselves using the same repetitive explanations again and again. Though many students have rotely memorized and are able to parrot terms like “inverse operations” and “balance the equation” when explaining their work, they are often thrown off when the problem requires even the slightest deviation from the way they have previously practiced. This session shows teachers how to get students ready to show what they have learned by not only having students practice explaining their thoughts, but teaching them how to best articulate the work they are already showing.
Teachers will:
1. Implement two zero-prep methods to enhance student academic production in mathematics;
2. Learn to monitor and correct route articulation practices and Push! students to produce organic independent explanations for their work.
From Brain to Paper: Using Structured Student Discourse to Maximize Student Learning in Mathematics
Description: You have defined terms, explained concepts, modeled problems and even had students follow along as you worked through a few samples together…but then it happens. The students try the problems on their own and many of them struggle to replicate what they have just seen and done with support. This session is designed to fix all of that. We will show how teachers can work with students at varying levels to ensure that they are not only hearing and transcribing but listening and comprehending during the instruction of new math concepts. Teachers will leave with a new view of what student discourse in mathematics can and should look like from pre-k through high school AP coursework.
Teachers will:
1. Learn and implement the Productive Progression and move the responsibility of articulation from the teacher to the learners;
2. Push! students to not only respond with greater levels of complexity and sophistication but also to formulate effective questions that initiate the problem-solving process.
Principles of Mathematics Instruction: How Implementing Common Beliefs About Instruction Magnifies Student Achievement
Description: All over the United States districts have adopted program after program only to find that results consistently end the same way --inconsistent. Some teachers find themselves highly successful while others struggle to find similar success program after program. This is a symptom for a common disease in mathematics instruction: teachers using the same materials but with vastly different belief systems about what makes for effective mathematics instruction. This session brings all the math teachers in your district together under one banner to endorse a consistent approach to principle-focused instruction that allows teachers to use their expertise and skills independently through a common set of rules and a common viewpoint of what makes instruction effective.
Teachers will:
1. Learn and articulate how the six Key Learning Acceleration Principles accelerate student learning and enhance standardized test scores;
2. Revise their current lesson structure and implementation practices to parallel a common set of instructional principles.
Predicting, Paraphrasing and Summarizing: Using Reading Comprehension Skills to Accelerate Learning in Mathematics
Description: Many math teachers are asked to support literacy instruction within their content area periods only to meet with early frustration and unanswered questions. In most cases, these teachers struggle to understand how reading comprehension can be taught within their subject area. In this session, we directly connect reading comprehension skills like predicting, making inferences, drawing conclusions and summarizing to the problem-solving processes in math. Teachers will see how to teach students to use their reading skills to improve their performance in mathematics.
Teachers will:
1. Articulate how reading comprehensions skills directly affect students’ mathematics learning;
2. Push! students to use common reading comprehension skills to enhance their ability to formulate equations for given situations and to solve problems.
Cracking the Code: Using Key Components of Language to Understand Math Word Problems
Description: The days of brute force computation and guess-and-check strategies to identify the most appropriate answer on weekly quizzes and state assessments are over. However, many students continue to struggle to identify key information, appropriate operations and pathways to solutions when reading complex word problems and scenarios. What would you say if we were to tell you that today, with current national testing requirements, the need to master the language of mathematics has surpassed the computation of mathematics in importance at every level? This session shows teachers how to harness the power of the English language and its eight parts of speech to make navigating the dreaded word problem a breeze.
Teachers will:
1. Learn the form and use of the eight English parts of speech and how they are used in math word problems;
2. Implement two language-focused mathematics methods that accelerate the learning of new math skills among all students.
The Language of Mathematics: A Primer on Using Language to Enhance Math Conversations
Description: Linguistically informed mathematics instruction provides students with the fundamentals of problem solving. But what would a truly linguistically informed approach to mathematics instruction look like? And what could it accomplish? Fasten your seat belts as you venture into a parallel universe where mathematics instruction seamlessly builds on students’ grammar knowledge and creates a launching pad for creating truly strategic and independent readers who understand math problems at a deep level.
Teachers will:
1. Understand and articulate differences between vocabulary-based and linguistically- informed mathematics;
2. Apply the hierarchical connections between applied-grammar instruction and linguistically-informed mathematics to increase students’ ability to navigate the information within math word problems to find logical solutions quickly and accurately.