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Professional learning should be joyful too! The PL experiences described below can take shape as a 2-hour introduction, a half-day or full-day workshop, a multi-day institute, or ongoing school-year support. Whatever the format, I design for depth — grounding each session in rich mathematics and real classroom decisions. I work with you to align these experiences with your school’s or district’s priorities and the specific students you serve.

I design curriculum and learning resources for G3–8 teachers and coaches, and provide advice and review for those who are writing their own.

  • Participants in this PL learn to make lessons where teachers do what they do best, boosted with assistance from AI. Participants may focus on meeting standards, culturally responsive lessons, using real data, or customizing open-access curricula. Using general-purpose AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, participants learn to design detailed lesson plans that are mathematically rich and contextually sensitive, and build on students’ strengths as well as needs. What's key is providing the AI with the right information, starting with a framwork that I designed to be easy to fill in, yet powerful. and supplementing with documents targetting the teacher’s area of focus.

    AI-assisted lesson planning can be combined with professional learning addressing a specific mathematical and pedagogical focus. Each workshop below pairs the planning framework with a topic that sharpens the essential knowlege that teachers bring to the process.

    The Why, How, and What of Learning Mathematics

    What's driving this investigation and does the lesson give students a real reason to pursue it?

    Guided Discovery in Practice

    How do you balance teacher guidance with student exploration — and how does that balance shift depending on the topic?

    Mathematical Argumentation in the Classroom

    What tasks foster conjecturing and justifying and how do teachers take advantage of the opportunities they afford?

    Making Mathematics Accessible to Every Student

    Is this language revision changing the access point, or changing the cognitive complexity of the task?

    AI Literacy for Math Teachers

    What kinds of knowledge do current AI tools draw on? What kinds can only come from the teacher?

  • Mathematical argumentation — students constructing viable arguments and critiquing the reasoning of others — sits at the heart of the Standards for Mathematical Practice and of what it means to do mathematics. To support students in arguing mathematically, teachers need a clear framework for the classroom, a repertoire of teaching moves that encourage it, and rich tasks that foster it — all grounded in a deep understanding of what mathematical argumentation actually is.

    I offer PL experiences in which participants learn how to build a classroom culture where students reason out loud, justify their thinking, and engage with each other's ideas. Teachers engage in argumentation tasks themselves first — because experiencing mathematics the way their students will is the most direct path to understanding what to teach for and how to support it. They learn instructional routines organized around four phases — Generating Cases, Conjecturing, Justifying, and Concluding. Teachers engage in tasks rich for argumentation, which can then be used in their classrooms. Questioning strategies are emphasized. Methods to encourage equitable classroom argumentation are discussed and tested. In longer workshops, participants engage in Visualization Planning in pairs, understanding the mathematics deeply and anticipating teacher and student moves.

  • Making — designing and building real objects for a purpose — is a powerful but underused context for mathematics learning. Making creates authentic contexts for learning and using math and draws on students’ strengths that may not typically show up in math class.Making also provides natural entry points to big mathematical ideas — measurement, proportion, geometry, data — that students investigate in depth rather than encounter in isolation. My colleagues and I have designed the MPACT curriculum units (grades 4–7, Creative Commons license, free to use and adapt) as complete resources for teaching math through making.

    PL on math-through-making (half day) introduces teachers to the MPACT curriculum and to the broader principles of making as a context for mathematics learning. In longer, multi-day workshops, teachers learn to make the projects in the units and how to support students in making. Techniques for drawing out the math are discussed and practiced, including the content-focused handouts that are included in the units.  Making as a tool for equity is emphasized. Teachers learn to use everyday craft and recycled materials, along with an inexpensive (around $200), easy-to-use 3D printer.

    Research on the MPACT curriculum, developed at TERC with funding from the U.S. Department of Education, showed significant learning gains for students on an assessment of  geometry, measurement, spatial reasoning, and computational thinking.

     Visit TERC’s MPACT Dissemination Hub for more information and to download the curriculum.

  • I collaborate with curriculum publishers, ed tech companies, and professional learning organizations to extend their work in mathematics. Drawing on three decades of NSF-funded curriculum design and research at TERC and SRI International, I bring deep expertise in how students learn mathematics and how teachers grow their practice.

    Together, we can:

    • Envision innovative curriculum designs that connect interactive, multi-representational technology with written materials

    • Design professional learning that meets current needs, with deep knowledge of the mathematics frameworks of Washington, Oregon, and California

Abstract geometric artwork with circles, squares, rectangles, and lines in shades of blue, black, red, and gray on a beige background.