Mathematics Education Project

Let the Mathematics Education Project (MEP) bring research-based professional development to your district or enroll in a workshop on UW Campus.

Site-based: Site-based: MEP offers a variety of programs in either an intensivesummer format or conveniently scheduled sessions throughout the schoolyear. Click here for a list of programs MEP can offer in your district.

Summer workshops at UW: Enroll now in professional development programsdesigned to increase your understanding of mathematics and pedagogy toimprove student learning. Click here for information and registration details of the workshops offered this summer.

Districts interested in partnering with the Mathematics Education Project should contact:

Rosemary Sheffield
Director, Mathematics Education Project
rsheffield@extn.washington.edu

The Mathematics Education Project (MEP) is a professional development resource for educators who are committed to transforming K-12 mathematics teaching and learning so all students develop accurate, reliable and flexible strategies and a robust understanding of mathematical concepts.

The Mathematics Education Project is the outgrowth of two projects funded by the National Science Foundation – Creating a Community of Mathematics Learners and Expanding a Community of Mathematics Learners. Through these projects, a community of educators from K-12 schools and the University of Washington gained extensive knowledge of research-based professional development resources, the art of facilitation, teacher leadership development, strategies for working with administrators and parents, and factors that contribute to sustainability of change. Through the MEP, this mathematics community and other colleagues in mathematics education at the UW intend to reach out to districts in the state of Washington and other states in the region.

Ruth Balf

Ruth Balf

Ruth is a former elementary school teacher, with 17 years of teaching experience, who is now working with the Mathematics Education Project as a professional educator full time. She has experience teaching mathematics methods courses for elementary school teachers and leading professional development for practicing teachers. Through her work with teachers, she hopes to build leadership capacity within schools and systems and help foster professional communities that focus on understanding students' mathematical thinking and experiences in classroom.

Allison Hintz

Allison Hintz

Prior to being a doctoral student and teaching assistant in the College of Education, Allison taught 5th grade for eight years in local Washington school districts. Her research interests have focused on the types of questions teachers and students use in mathematical discourse. In hopes of supporting students' participation and feelings of efficacy in mathematics, she is currently studying girls' underlying feelings about participation in discussion-intensive math classrooms.

Mandy Hubbard

Mandy Hubbard

Mandy is a doctoral candidate in the Cognitive Studies program, a former New York City public school teacher, and former Educational Director of Morry's Camp, a year-round youth development organization in New York State. She has worked with children ages 2-17 and her primary research interest is teacher learning in elementary mathematics, leading her to focus on student thinking, classroom discourse, and issues of identity and equity.

Lisa Jilk

Lisa Jilk

Lisa Jilk is currently a Research Associate in the College of Education and an Instructional Coach with Seattle Public Schools. Lisa taught high school mathematics for ten years before pursuing doctoral studies at Michigan State University. Lisa supports secondary math teachers to use Complex Instruction strategies to create classroom communities that promote equitable student participation. Her research focuses on the ways in which mathematics classrooms that use Complex Instruction provide opportunities for students to use their salient identities as cultural tools for learning mathematics.

Elham Kazemi

Elham Kazemi

Elham is an associate professor of Curriculum and Instruction. Her teaching and research interests include sociocultural analyses of learning and change, teacher education, and school reform initiatives. Her work centers on mathematics education, and she is particularly interested in how teachers interpret and make use of research-based frameworks on the development of children's mathematical thinking. Her work situates teacher learning and professional growth within broader school cultures.

Megan Kelley-Petersen

Megan Kelley-Petersen

Megan is a former elementary classroom teacher who is now working on a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction in the area of Elementary Math Education. She is most interested in the area of teacher learning and collaboration and how these impact student understanding and performance in regards to elementary math instruction. She still works for Seattle Public Schools as a Math Coach, continuously working with elementary teachers in collaborative settings to improve their instructional practices.

Anita Lenges

Anita Lenges

Anita is a member of faculty in the Masters in Teaching program at The Evergreen State College. Her research and professional development focus is teacher preparation that supports racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students to thrive in mathematically rich environments.

Rosemary Sheffield

Rosemary Sheffield

Rosemary Sheffield is director of Center Connect, the College of Education's outreach unit, and senior director in UW Educational Outreach. She coordinates the development and offering of content-focused professional development for educators. Most recently, she has been project director for Creating a Community of Mathematics Learners and Expanding a Community of Mathematics Learners, two projects funded by the National Science Foundation and focused on professional development in mathematics education for elementary, middle and high school teachers in six districts. Currently, she directs the Mathematics Education Project, which partners with districts to offer content-focused, site-based professional development.

Virginia Stimpson

Virginia Stimpson

Gini is a teaching associate within the College of Education, former high school mathematics teacher for the Mercer Island School District, and former chair of the Research Advisory Council of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. She works to bridge the worlds of math education research and those directly responsible for the teaching and learning of mathematics within schools by supporting districts with a long-term vision for systemic change. Most recently Gini has been involved in researching Leadership Content Knowledge as a result of her work as the internal evaluator of Lenses on Learning Secondary.

The Mathematics Education Project (MEP) strives to provide opportunities for mathematics teachers to participate in a community of mathematics learners that identifies, examines and addresses emerging issues related to improving student learning in mathematics.

MEP aims to …

With the expected outcomes …

Teachers

Teacher Leaders/Coaches/Mentors

Principals

Parents

The Mathematics Education Project draws on research-based resources to increase educators' knowledge of mathematics and pedagogy to improve student learning. Programs focus on content and processes emphasized in the Essential Academic Learning Requirements and the Revised Mathematics Standards.

MEP has the capacity to offer the following programs in your district:

Developing Mathematical Ideas: A curriculum designed to help teachers think through major ideas of K-7 mathematics and examine how children develop those ideas. Modules include: Building a System of Tens, Making Meaning for Operations, Geometry: Examining Features of Shape, Geometry: Measuring Space in One, Two and Three Dimensions, Working with Data, Reasoning Algebraically about Operations, and Patterns, Functions, and Change.

Cognitively Guided Instruction: A K-5 professional development program that provides a framework for teachers to understand the development of children's computational fluency.

Young Mathematicians at Work: Video-based materials for K-8 teachers through which participants follow an instructional sequence over several lessons. Content: number sense, number system, place value, addition, subtraction multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, percents, ratios, mathematical models, and algebra.

Working with Parents and the Public: A series to help parents and the public learn to recognize and support quality mathematics programs in schools.

Lenses on Learning: Classroom Observation and Teacher Supervision in Elementary Mathematics An opportunity for administrators and teacher leaders to think through ideas that underlie standards-based reform in mathematics teaching and learning.

Lenses on Learning: Secondary: Offers school and district leaders experiences designed to deepen their understanding of mathematics teaching, learning and assessment to evaluate site-specific data related to current practices, and to strategically plan how to impact current practices in order to increase deep learning of mathematics for all students.

Connecting Mathematical Ideas: Uses video cases of mathematics teaching at the middle school level, and in-depth analysis of each lesson from both a theoretical and practical standpoint.

Implementing Standards-based Mathematics Instruction: Identifies features of problems that engage students in mathematical reasoning and problem-solving.

Fostering Algebraic Thinking Toolkit: Teachers in grades 6-10 identify, describe and foster algebraic thinking in their students. A core belief underlying the program is that good mathematics teaching begins with understanding how mathematics is learned. Activities include hands-on investigations, language for talking and thinking about algebraic thinking, collecting data and analyzing students' mathematical thinking, and mathematics problems that elicit and develop algebraic thinking.

Fostering Geometric Thinking Toolkit: Hands-on opportunities to develop teachers' new understandings of grades 6-10 geometric thinking, broaden and express their own geometric thinking by solving rich problems, observe students' thinking and problem solving through in-the-classroom footage, practice analyzing student work and apply all they've learned in the sessions to engage students' thinking more effectively.

Computational Fluency: Focuses on how students typically develop their understanding of numbers and operations in the early years. Includes classroom routines to build understanding of the meaning of operations and their relationship to each other, a large repertoire of number relationships (number facts), and the base ten number system.

Algebraic Thinking and Effective Teaching Practices – Rethinking What's Possible for ALL Learners: Effective instructional strategies for English Language Learners, students who have historically struggled with mathematics and those who have been successful. Teachers use research as a framework for reflecting on their own teaching practices identify strategies to test in their classrooms.

Math Labs: Provides opportunities for teachers to cooperatively plan mathematical tasks, observe the tasks being enacted, enact the task themselves and then debrief the entire experience. Teachers engage in mathematics themselves as they consider instructional activities to try out with a given group of elementary student (one of the participants' actual class of students). Administrators, instructional assistants, and teacher leaders often participate in Math Labs.

Developing Mathematical Ideas: Reasoning Algebraically about Operations

Participants examine generalizations at the heart of the study of operations in the elementary grades. They express these generalizations in common language and in algebraic notation, develop arguments based on representations of the operations, study what it means to prove a generalization and extend their generalizations and arguments when the domain under consideration expands from whole numbers to integers. They consider teacher moves that support students in making generalizations and justifications.

Schedule: July 6-10, 2009 For more information and to register, click here.

Young Mathematicians at Work: Number Sense and Computation (K-5)

Participants use video-based materials to follow an instructional sequence over several lessons. Participants study the teacher's moves that support student learning, follow particular students as their understanding develops, analyze curricular design and choices, and see how teachers meet the needs of a diverse group of students. The math content will be a K-5 focus.

Schedule: August 3 -7, 2009 For more information and to register, click here.

Research-based Resources

The Mathematics Education Project draws on research-based resources to increase educators' knowledge of mathematics and pedagogy to improve student learning. The work focuses on content and processes emphasized in the Essential Academic Learning Requirements (EALRs) and assessed by the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL).

View and download materials used at MEP sessions.

Developing Mathematical Ideas: A curriculum designed to help teachers think through major ideas of K-7 mathematics and examine how children develop those ideas.

Cognitively Guided Instruction: A K-5 professional development program that provides a framework for teachers to understand the development of children's computational fluency.

Young Mathematicians at Work: Uses video-based materials for K-6 teachers through which participants follow an instructional sequence over several lessons.

Working with Parents and the Public: A series to help parents and the public learn to recognize and support quality mathematics programs in schools.

Lenses on Learning – Classroom Observation and Teacher Supervision in Elementary/Secondary Mathematics: An opportunity for administrators and teacher leaders to think through ideas that underlie standards-based reform in mathematics teaching and learning.

Connecting Mathematical Ideas: Uses video cases of mathematics teaching at the middle school level, and in-depth analysis of each lesson from both a theoretical and practical standpoint.

Implementing Standards-Based Mathematics Instruction: Identifies features of problems that engage students in mathematical reasoning and problem-solving.

Supporting Elementary Mathematics through LongTerm Professional Education - Elham Kazemi

Appears in Curriculum in Context Journal of Washington State Association of Supervision & Curriculum Development

Around the state, there is a buzz about improving mathematics teaching and learning. We are bombarded, almost daily, with what our students and schools cannot do. Transforming mathematics teaching and learning is not likely to happen overnight, but it does depend on our efforts to build capacity for systems to learn and to learn together. The good news is that there now exists an array of professional resources to help. When embedded in a longterm, coherent plan and used skillfully, these resources can support schools and districts to develop more coherent and robust instruction that aims for mathematical fluency for all students.

Read full article

Adapting Cases from a Developing Mathematical Ideas Seminar to Examine the Work of Teaching Closely

Appears in Association of Mathematics Teacher Education Monograph, 4, 21-33

This chapter describes three uses of cases from the Building a System of Tens (BST) seminar. BST is one of seven modules available in the Developing Mathematical Ideas professional education materials (Schifter, Bastable, & Russell, 1999). BST is designed to support elementary teachers in analyzing how students develop a robust understanding of the base-ten system. The cases help seminar teachers learn how students' thinking develops when they are given opportunities to share and explore their understanding and their confusions. We describe how we have used particular cases th achieve a focused set of goals especially targeted for teachers who are beginning to learn to build instruction on students' thinking. We explain how strategic use of cases brings to the surface the significant work that teachers do when they design tasks and anticipate, elicit, and respond to students' mathematical ideas.

Read full article

The Mathematics Education Project (MEP) partners with schools and districts to transform mathematics teaching and learning so all students develop a robust understanding of mathematical concepts and accurate, reliable and efficient strategies.

The MEP seeks to partner with school districts committed to developing and implementing a long-term professional development plan for systemic improvement of mathematics education. The project is prepared to work with districts in the design of professional development opportunities that are content-focused, research-based, and offered onsite for a variety of audiences. The MEP is also prepared to develop content-focused professional development for curriculum implementation. The format will vary according to the needs of each school district, but it is expected that whatever work is started will be part of a long-term, ongoing plan.

Current district and ESD partners