Teachers want agency!
What do we want as mathematics teachers? We want to have an impact on our students. We want to do our best teaching more often in more lessons across more classes. In other words, we need to have agency.
Here’s the thing about teacher agency … When all our students have agency, they open the door for us to do our best teaching. The more agency our students have, the more agency we have.
This PD is about learning to present mathematics in ways that foster agency in students … so that we gain agency … so that we can do our best teaching more often in more lessons across more classes.
Let's stop demanding students learn formulas by rote
Too often, we present mathematics in ways that have students working with formulas without understanding the related concepts. The only way to learn mathematical formulas when the related concepts are not understood is by rote. However, recalling mathematical formulas by rote is an impossible task.
(BTW, Mathematics educators do not recall mathematical formulas by rote because we use our understanding of related concepts to help us remember formulas!)
This PD is about learning to present mathematics to students in ways that have students understand the concepts upon which the formulas are based.
Implementing strategies with your students
One of the program's key features is implementing strategies from the PD with your students. However, we don’t want anyone implementing strategies that do not make sense. Our role is to shift your awareness so that the strategies make sense. Once that happens, you will want to implement them.