Supporting Sense Making with Mathematical Bet Lines

Publications

This article presents a mathematics discourse technique adapted from literacy instruction to promote sense making when teachers are launching a lesson about story problems. Math Bet Lines helps all students engage with the meaning of the story problem and is particularly beneficial for emergent multilingual learners. In this article we discuss how teachers implemented the Math Bet Lines technique and share their successes, challenges, and tips for overcoming those challenges.

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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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Controlled Implementations: Teaching Practice to Practicing Mathematics Teachers

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In this chapter, we use the Framework for Teaching Practice (Grossman, Compton, Igra, Ronfeldt, Shahan, & Williamson, 2009) as a conceptual tool for analyzing the design of professional development. Although initially developed to examine the education of prospective teachers, we contend that this framework is appropriate for analyzing and supporting the design of professional development. The framework consists of three elements: decompositions, representations, and approximations of practice. We use these three elements to examine the literature on professional development and discuss how

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