Mathematics Professional Learning
Customized mathematics professional development for teachers, coaches, instructional specialists, and administrators in your district.
We know that all students are capable of engaging with and understanding rich mathematics. Each student brings important mathematical, social, cultural, linguistic, and community funds of knowledge that inform their work in the mathematics classroom. We also know that teaching is complex intellectual, relational, and practical work. Teaching practice develops over time through collaborative processes within a professional community. With this in mind, we design mathematics professional learning that supports educators to:
- Develop robust content and pedagogical knowledge
- Learn about the knowledge, perspectives, and ideas that their students bring and design learning experiences that build on those ideas
- Engage students in rigorous content learning
- Challenge inequities and create schools that are more just, equitable institutions for learning
Classroom-Embedded Professional Learning![]() | Mathematics Professional Learning Courses![]() | Custom-Designed Learning Experiences![]() |
Learning Labs: Classroom-Embedded Professional Learning
Professional learning woven into the fabric of your school day.
Learning Labs are a design for classroom-embedded professional learning that brings together educator collaboration and the day-to-day work of teaching. We partner with you to foster collaborative communities in which educators learn from one another, develop a shared vision of high-quality mathematics teaching and practices that work toward this vision, and take this learning into classrooms with students.
What to Expect
- Learning experiences tailored to the learning goals, histories, and existing structures and routines of your school
- Long-term, ongoing relationship of at least one school year
- Support for instructional leadership to sustain the work between sessions and beyond our collaboration
Learn More About Learning Labs
- Math Labs: Teachers, Teacher Educators, and School Leaders Learning Together With and From Their Own Students
- Innovations in Improving Mathematics Instruction: One School's Story of Implementing Job-Embedded School-wide Professional Development
- Teacher Time Out: Educators Learning Together In and Through Practice
- Additional resources available at Teacher Education by Design
Mathematics Professional Learning Courses
Engage a group of teachers, coaches, and/or administrators in your school or district in a professional learning experience. Each course can be adapted for in-person or online settings. Sample structures are provided for each course, but these can be tailored to meet your particular needs. Clock hours are available.
- Children's Mathematics and Young Children's Mathematics Book Studies
In this course, participants will learn about the development of children's concepts of number and strategies for solving problems across grade levels. Each session will invite educators to discuss readings from either Children's Mathematics (K-5) or Young Children's Mathematics (PreK-1), two texts from the Cognitively Guided Instruction body of research. Children's Mathematics describes how children develop strategies for solving problems across addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, as well as classroom practices to support this development. Young Children's Mathematics focuses on how young children develop ideas of counting, quantity, and problem solving and supporting classroom practices.
In this 8-session book study, participants will:
- Deepen their understanding of the development of children’s mathematical thinking
- Learn about how different types of problems influence the strategies that children use
- Explore how children develop understandings of number, place value, and operations
- Consider strategies for eliciting student thinking and engaging students with each others’ ideas
- Try ideas from the readings with their own students and analyze student thinking together
Details
- Eight 1-hour sessions held online or in-person at your location
- Up to 25 participants
- Interactive and engaging learning activities
- Discussion of assigned research-based readings & implications for classroom practice
- 12 clock hours are available for full participation in the module including sessions & reading time (partial clock hours available upon request)
- Timing of the module is flexible and can be modified to suit your school or district's needs
- Beyond Correct & Incorrect: Interviewing Children About Their Mathematical Thinking
Learning about our students’ mathematical thinking at the beginning of the school year will be more important this year than ever. What do students already know? What are good next steps for their learning? In this course, educators will investigate how children develop important mathematical ideas across grade levels and consider how to use interviews and observations to pay careful attention to the details of their mathematical thinking. Videos and artifacts from math interviews will provide a context for honing our skill in analyzing children’s thinking and considering implications for instruction. Together, we’ll plan math interviews to try with our own students and reflect on what we learn. Importantly, we will consider ways to use an interview/observation approach to formative assessment flexibly in online and in-person settings.
This course can be tailored for grade level cohorts, K-1 or 2-5. Both versions of the course focus on number and operation, but the approach to formative assessment will be useful across mathematics. In the grades PreK-1 cohort, we will learn about how children develop counting and strategies for single-digit operations. In the grades 2-5 cohort, we will learn about how children develop strategies for whole number operation. Learning in both cohorts will draw upon the work of Cognitively Guided Instruction.
In this 4-session course, participants will:
- Deepen their understanding of how children develop important mathematical ideas over time.
- Gain confidence in using this knowledge to analyze students’ mathematical thinking.
- Consider a range of flexible strategies for assessing students’ mathematical thinking and prepare to lead formative assessment interviews/observations with their own students.
Details
- Four 2-hour sessions held online or in-person at your location
- Up to 25 participants
- Interactive and engaging learning activities
- Classroom-embedded assignments & research-based readings provided between sessions
- 11 clock hours available for full participation in the course including sessions & reading/assignment completion time
- Timing of the module is flexible and can be modified to suit your school or district's needs
- Cognitively Guided Instruction Institute
Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) is a body of research that helps us understand how children's mathematical ideas develop over time and how teachers can use this knowledge to inform their instruction. This institute provides an introduction to decades of research on the development of children's mathematical thinking as well as classroom practices that center children's mathematical thinking.
In this 3-day institute, participants will:
- Deepen their understanding of the development of children’s mathematical thinking
- Learn about how different types of problems influence the strategies that children use
- Explore how children develop understandings of number, place value, and operations
- Learn about and prepare to lead routine instructional activities that can allow us elicit student thinking and engage students with each others’ ideas
Grade-Band Cohorts
Depending on your learning goals and the number of teachers participating, the institute can be organized as a single K-5 institute or grade-band cohorts.
- K-1: Explore how young children’s counting develops over time and their strategies for making sense of and solving problems. Learn about, plan, and practice routine instructional activities that can support young children’s learning about these ideas.
- 2-3: Develop understanding of children’s strategies for making sense of and solving problems including a wide variety of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problem types. We will consider how children make use of place value and properties of operations in their strategy use and how their thinking develops over time.
- 4-5: Take a deep dive into fractions. Learn about children’s understandings about the meaning of fractions, comparison of fractions and equivalence, and children’s strategies for operating with fractions.
Details
- Three 6-hour sessions held in-person at your location (online version available in the form of shorter sessions distributed across multiple days)
- Up to 25 participants
- Interactive and engaging learning activities
- Discussion of assigned research-based readings & implications for classroom practice
- Classroom-embedded assignments, if timing of institute allows
- 20 clock hours are available for full participation in the module including sessions & reading time
- Timing of the module is flexible and can be modified to suit your school or district's needs
What do participants say?
- "I learned that counting is like learning a new language for kids. Things that we take for granted as known like teen numbers, decades, place value, etc are all things that children need to learn and practice to be fluent in counting." -- K-1 participant
- "So often we tend to focus on what students need help with instead of first thinking about what they already know and what strengths they have in order to help them improve. I will definitely take away the importance of what students bring into the classroom from their own experiences and not labeling kids as "high" or "low." The content presented was useful and informative and will definitely be used in the classroom in the upcoming year." -- K-1 participant
- "This course really helped me to understand how multiple Common Core State Standards are meaningfully and intentionally incorporated into one lesson and the importance of foundational standards in K-2, unit fractions in 3rd, equivalence and operations in 4-5." -- 4-5 participant
Do your teachers already have some knowledge of Cognitively Guided Instruction? Let's work together to create an institute that builds on this introductory institute.
Visit the 2017 National Cognitively Guided Instruction Conference website, hosted by the University of Washington.
Custom-Designed Learning Experiences
Interested in developing your team's content knowledge in a particular domain? Want to gain expertise in leading instructional routines? Have another mathematics learning need? Tell us more about your interests.