Services

Professional Learning for Teachers and Coaches

Bring joy and rigor to PL! 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 and practical application. I work with you to align these experiences with your school’s or district’s priorities and the specific students you serve.

Curriculum and Learning Resource Design and Review

I design digital and paper-based materials for grades 4–8 mathematics and computational thinking, focused on the. five strands of proficiency. I work with UX designers to forefront mathematics in app design.

  • PL participants learn best practices for lesson planning, boosted with assistance from AI.

    Participants can 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 design detailed lesson plans that are mathematically rich and contextually sensitive, and build on students’ strengths as well as needs.

    Lesson planning includes…

    • Completing a 4-part planning table

    • Purposeful rounds of revision

    • Producing a final draft, including student materials

    Customize the PL to focus on one or more of the following:

    Guided Discovery, Problem-based Learning 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?

  • 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.

    Based on Mathematical Argumentation in Middle School: the What, Why, and How (Corwin)

    Teachers…

    Engage in argumentation tasks themselves first.

    Learn and practice instructional routines organized around conjecturing and justifying.

    Try out methods to encourage equitable classroom argumentation. In longer workshops, participants engage in Visualization Planning in pairs, understanding the mathematics deeply and anticipating teacher and student moves.

  • Currriculum-based PL for ‍math-and-making curriculum units (grades 4–7, Creative Commons license, free to use and adapt) as complete resources for teaching math through making.

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

    PL on math-through-making

    Half day introduction to the MPACT curriculum and principles of making as a context for mathematics learning.

    Multi-day workshops. Participants make projects themselves and learn to support students in making. Making as a tool for equity is emphasized.

    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.

    About making

    Making — designing and building real objects for a purpose — is a powerful context for mathematics learning.

    Making creates authentic contexts for learning and using math.

    It 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.

  • 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. I bring 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.