Day 1—Critical Issues in Mathematics Education (MSRI 2016)

The 2016 CIME workshop actually began Wednesday afternoon (Day 0?) with a  couple of talks  that framed the workshop.  Day 1 began this morning at 8:30 AM with a wonderful presentation by Deborah Ball,(How) Can we “see” the work of teaching mathematics?. All of the talks will eventually be streamed online from the MSRI's website at http://www.msri.org/workshops/793/schedules.

Today's morning schedule:

•  8:30 AM–9:45 AM. (How) Can we “see” the work of teaching mathematics?—Deborah Ball (University of Michigan).  Watch the video because this was one of the best presentations of the day.


• 9:45 AM–10:45 AM.vSeeing the math in teaching—Roger Howe (Yale University), Lindsey Mann (University of Michigan).  Video available.


• 11:15 AM–12:15 PM.vAttending to student thinking and their interactions when working in small groups—Chris Rasmussen (San Diego State University).  Video available.

All three talks were great.  Deborah Ball played a clip of an elementary class.  After watching the class and making comments, we viewed the video again with no sound forcing us to pay attention to things we missed the first time.

The afternoon schedule:

• 1:00 PM–2:30 PM Observing practices that support learners’ identity development and participation in mathematics classrooms—Lawrence Clark (University of Maryland), Imani Goffney (University of Houston), Whitney Johnson (Morgan State University), Danny Martin (University of Illinois, Chicago). Video available.


• 2:45 PM–3:45 PM Parallel sessions (I was only able to attend 1.a and 1.b.)
• 1.a: Mathematical micro-identities: Students’ positioning and learning during mathematics lessons—Marcy Wood (University of Arizona). Video available.
• 1.b: Watching mathematicians at work: Mathematical knowledge for teaching calculus and the practice of examining student work—Natasha Speer (The University of Maine).  Natasha's research project sounds interesting and directly applicable to how we teach the first two years of undergraduate mathematics. Video available.
• 1.c: Using video to develop pre-service teachers’ professional vision of ambitious mathematics instruction—Elizabeth van Es (University of California, Irvine)
• 1.d: Teaching and learning mathematical practices in the early elementary grades—Hyman Bass (University of Michigan), Sarah Selling (University of Michigan)

•  4:15 PM–5:15 PM Designing video clubs for teacher learning—Miriam Sherin (Northwestern University). WOW! What a great idea. Video clips would be easy to implement with graduate teaching assistants. Watch the MSRI video of this talk.


• 5:15 PM–6:00 PM The practice and use of observation in powerful professional development: The teaching-for-robust-understanding (TRU) framework—Alan Schoenfeld (University of California, Berkeley). Some great material here. Definitely watch the MSRI video.  Schoenfeld's websites are particularly useful: http://map.mathshell.org/index.php and http://ats.berkeley.edu.