Talk is the Ticket to Teaching Math to English Learners

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This article describes a mathematics professional development program for elementary school teachers focused on improving mathematics discourse for all students, in particular emergent multilingual learners. Frameworks, such as the Math Discourse Matrix (Sztajn, Heck, & Malzahn, 2020) that characterizes four types of discourse (correcting, eliciting, probing, responsive) and other resources aimed at planning and implementing lessons that support emergent multilingual learners' engagement in productive mathematical discussions are shared.

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Decomposing Practice in Teacher Professional Development: Examining sequences of learning activities

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In this paper, we engage in an analysis of professional development design, examining professional development activities and the sequencing of professional learning tasks. We use a theoretical framework typically used in pre-service teacher education to understand the design of one professional development program. Our overarching goal is to theorize about how to design professional development and sequence professional learning tasks for practicing teachers. Specifically, this study uses the concepts of decompositions of practice (Grossman et al., 2009), and levels of decomposition (Boerst

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Activating Math Talk: 11 Purposeful Techniques for Your Elementary Students

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Many mathematics teachers agree that engaging students in high-quality discourse is important for their conceptual learning, but successfully promoting such discourse in elementary classrooms—with attention to the needs of every learner—can be a challenge. Activating Math Talk tackles this challenge by bringing practical, math-specific, productive discourse techniques that are applicable to any lesson or curriculum. Framed around 11 student-centered discourse techniques, this research-based book connects purposeful instructional techniques to specific lesson goals and includes a focus on

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