Division of Mathematics Learning and Teaching

Exploring, Learning and Teaching Geometry: Learning by doing. In this Institute, teachers will investigate a variety of problem contexts—making, testing, and proving (or disproving) conjectures—and create activities that will allow their students to be mathematical explorers themselves (focusing on geometry). The underlying philosophy of this institute is that students (and teachers) learn mathematics by doing mathematics. For that reason, most time will be spent investigating various mathematical problems and contexts. We will use a variety of manipulatives for this work (paper folding and Miras, for example), but we will also make use of Geometer’s Sketchpad dynamic geometry software. Dynamic geometry applications are ideal tools with which to explore mathematical ideas and to give students (and teachers) experience with deep mathematical investigations. Lenses on Learning for K–8 Teacher Leaders, Coaches and Instructional Leaders This course intends to build skills and content knowledge to support effective mathematics coaching. To build the capacity to recognize and cultivate high-quality mathematics teaching, participants will use Lenses on Learning materials and the DOE’s Characteristics of a Standards-Based Mathematics Classroom document to observe and analyze videos of mathematics classroom teaching. Participants will explore each session’s content focus (whole number operations, multiplicative thinking, rational numbers and proportional reasoning, geometric measurement, data analysis) in order to understand the underlying mathematical concepts in the rich way necessary for coaching and instructional leadership.

Massachusetts Department of Education Summer Professional Development Institutes