Dr. Jennifer M. Suh

Math Podcasts

https://mathed.podomatic.com/

Making Math Moments That Matter Podcast

Love how my friends at Howard County share all their wonderful math resources.

https://hcpss.instructure.com/courses/106/pages/grade-2-routines

Look fors by my friend John San Giovanni gets at the heart of meaningful math teaching!!!

https://blog.heinemann.com/lookfors-math-5-9

Lewis, C. (2015). What is improvement science? Do we need it in education? Educational Researcher, 44(1), 54–61.

process of improving practice through systematic inquiry

HOW DO WE ACCELERATE RESEARCH THAT SHOWS EVIDENCE OF POSITIVE OUTCOMES>

Education researchers engage in improving practice, but their findings are seldom shared beyond their school, district, or state (Zeichner, 2001). Thus, promising practices often are not implemented in new contexts or are implemented on a large scale without the necessary capacity to do so and without careful attention to the challenges of implementation (Bryk et al., 2015; Coburn & Stein, 2010)

https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/midwest/pdf/REL_2017264.pdf

As I begin a new semester with excited new pre-service teachers, I am inspired by Ilana Horn’s book @ilana_horn, Motivated- Designing Math Classrooms Where Students Want to Join In! She identifies five features of a motivational classroom: Students’ sense of belongingness, the meaningfulness of learning, students’ competence, structures for accountability and students’ autonomy. Dr. Horn shared how the mathematics classrooms are socially risky places and how we need to decrease that social risk to increase student participation and math talk. Thank you to stellar teachers like @pegcagle, Rafranz Davis, Sadie Estrella, Chris Luniak, Fawn Ngyuen, Elizabeth Statmore who open up their practices and routines that motivate student participation. I believe all their effort builds each and every student to have math power. M-power “empower” as I like to call it.

This powerful message aligns with 7 best equitable teaching practices that I call COMPUTE to provide equity in the math classroom that I will share with my pre-service teachers and with teachers I work with Lesson Study.

COMPUTE for Equitable Teaching and Learning in the Math Classroom

• Caring, celebrating and connecting to cultural diversity, cultural contexts and the world we live in to engage in mathematics.
• Owning the math-  Allow students to share their mathematical thinking and author math ideas that builds on collective knowledge
• Motivating student to learn by providing experience that taps into learners curiosity and interest where they find challenge and academic success.
• Problem Posing and Problem Solving as the core math activities to develop metacognition.
• Understanding with competence and confidence that builds  students’ math identity
• Targeted feedback to math learning for individual needs and accountable learning
• Emotionally supportive learning environment where learners feel safe, valued and cared for where mistakes are embraced as steps to learning.

(See blog connecting COMPUTE Equity with Math Modeling Activities that Connect to Students Lived Experiences http://drjennifersuh.onmason.com/2019/08/20/m-power-through-mathematical-modeling-foregrounding-equity-in-modeling-activities/

Research shows that teachers have rich lived experiences that impacts their beliefs about math teaching and learning. Many have had meaningful eureka moments in math when they first discovered the beauty of the pattern in numbers like seeing how all the sums of odd numbers were square numbers or a phenomenal math happening like using math to figure out exactly how much food to prepare for a Thanksgiving! Well, you always overestimate when it comes to food and inviting company 🙂 The fact is that when push comes to shove, we teach the way we were taught. So if we really want to invite our students into learning environments where they feel like they belong, we will have to be sure we keep equitable teaching practices front and center. Van de walle et al (2019) showcases the 8 teaching practices that we hope all our aspiring teachers see in their present field placements and hope to implement in their future classrooms.

With the open access and availability of instructional resources on the internet, teachers need think more like teachers as designers and researchers and not just consumers of instructional materials. This is an important teaching skill that allows teachers to be more judicious when selecting tasks and materials for instruction, accessing student learning through action research in their respective classrooms.

Many of these resources are vetted by educators but individual teachers still owe it to themselves and their students to collect evidence of effectiveness based on their teaching context, student population and needs.

That is where EQUAL Mathematics comes in! This website is part of my instructional resources that helps teachers take existing units, lessons and tasks and supplement the material with an equitable teaching lens. How does the material attend to diverse learners who may need a connection to real world application? What are ways to engage each and every learner to activity participate in the sense making process as the lesson progresses so that one can build ownership in their math thinking? What are the multiple representations that are used to communicate math understanding in small groups and to build collective knowledge in the classroom? What routines for sense making and reasoning is encouraged to promote critical thinking ?

http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEFUSA_NewVisionforEducation_Report2015.pdf 

These are some smaller grants that I have seen success with teachers/leaders:

https://www.nctm.org/Grants/

https://www.neafoundation.org/for-educators/

https://mccartheydressman.org/teacher-development-grants/

https://teach.com/what/teachers-change-lives/grants-for-teachers/

Other Grant & Fellowship Opportunities

http://www.msri.org/workshops/919