Rounding Up returns next week for its fifth season, examining even more ideas, concepts, and practices that shape teaching and learning in elementary mathematics classrooms. This season, we invite our listeners to engage with us by leaving a comment on our website, mathlearningcenter.org/podcast. We look forward to hearing from you!

TRANSCRIPT

Mike Wallus: Rounding Up returns for Season 5 next Thursday, September 3rd, with brand-new episodes. We'll examine ideas, concepts, and practices that shape teaching and learning in elementary mathematics classrooms. I'm your host, Mike Wallus, the vice president of educator support at The Math Learning Center, the organization behind the Bridges in Mathematics curriculum for early childhood learners all the way through fifth grade.

This season, we'll chat with experts in classroom infrastructure—

Tutita Casa: We're trying to take those unspoken norms that the board is a space that traditionally is led by the teacher, commanded by the teacher, too often didactically, and how can we open up that space to reflect what our students are thinking?

Mike: Content—

Patrick Sullivan: I felt like my teaching improved exponentially when I just started listening to my students. And I'm like, "Oh, they don't really understand that the way I thought they would." And OK, so now I can modify and I can latch on to what they're telling me as opposed to just me thinking, "Oh, this is what's going to be best."

Mike: Math identity and classroom culture—

Fawnda Norman: Math is about making connections and communicating with each other. It's not just about solving the problem and getting the right answer. And so, if we can get students to communicate with each other, they're gonna learn that they are all mathematicians and we can all do this.

Mike: Identifying critical moments in the classroom—

Jamila Riser: Where's this moment in the lesson where the students have potentially the greatest, most visible opportunities to make the key connections that they had identified in the lesson to reach that goal?

Mike: And a whole lot more.

Make sure to subscribe on your preferred podcast app so you don't miss an episode, or head over to mathlearningcenter.org/podcast, where you can share your thoughts and experiences relating to each episode with us.

Rounding Up is brought to you by The Math Learning Center and the Maier Math Foundation, dedicated to inspiring and enabling all individuals to discover their mathematical confidence and ability.

ROUNDING UP: SEASON 4 | EPISODE 24

Learning to record students' mathematical thinking might best be described as "on-the-job training" with a great deal of trial and error and a lot of practice.

In this rereleased episode from Season 1, Nicole Garcia from the University of Michigan talks about the practice of recording student thinking and offers insight on this challenging but crucial practice.

BIOGRAPHY

Nicole Garcia is an experienced mathematics teacher, professional developer, and teacher educator focused on practice-based approaches to teacher learning. In her work as the associate director of TeachingWorks at the University of Michigan, she supports teachers, coaches, administrators, and teacher educators to ensure that all students have access to strong instruction.

RESOURCES

"Recording Student Thinking in a Mathematics Discussion" journal article

Inside Mathematics website

TRANSCRIPT

Click here for a full episode transcript.

ROUNDING UP: SEASON 4 | EPISODE 23

For quite a few adults, fractions were a stumbling block in their education, causing them to lose their footing and begin to doubt their ability to make sense of math. But this doesn't have to be the case for our students!

In this rerelease of an episode from Season 2, we're talking with Susan Empson, PhD, about big ideas in fractions and how we can make them more meaningful for our students.

BIOGRAPHY

Susan B. Empson is an emerita professor in the department of Learning, Teaching, and Curriculum at the University of Missouri. She and Vicki Jacobs are currently collaborating on a National Science Foundation research grant to study elementary teachers' learning and development centered on teaching in ways that are responsive to children's mathematical thinking in the domain of rational numbers. Her research on children's thinking about fractions is the topic of her 2011 book, Extending Children's Mathematics: Fractions and Decimals (with co-author Linda Levi), and she has published widely in refereed journals, including Cognition and Instruction, Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, Educational Studies in Mathematics, Teaching Children Mathematics, and Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education. She has been a researcher of Cognitively Guided Instruction since 1989 and is a co-author of Children's Mathematics: Cognitively Guided Instruction (1st and 2nd editions).

RESOURCES

Extending Children's Mathematics: Fractions and Decimals book by Susan B. Empson and Linda Levi

Mathematics Teacher: Learning and Teaching PK-12 journal articles authored and co-authored by Susan Empson

TRANSCRIPT

Click here for a full episode transcript.