Early Career Teaching Institute

During this session, participants will read and engage in the practice of questioning in the mathematics classroom.  We'll experience a lesson and review the why behind how thoughtful questions build student knowledge and depth of understanding.  Further, we will deepen our "teacher moves" for implementing questioning in the classroom and debrief this experience, creating goals for next steps.

Learning Goals

• I can understand the different types of questions and why these are important in the math classroom.
• I can plan for the different types of questions based on the mathematical goal.
• I can implement questioning through different teacher move strategies the ensure all students have a full understanding.

Teachers are individuals who deeply care about the development of their students and communities. However, as professionals, they regularly encounter and navigate complex systemic challenges in their daily work. In their daily practice, teachers are pivotal in challenging and dismantling harmful structures that impede their efforts to foster student well-being and curiosity. The path to real change begins with a candid acknowledgment of pedagogical shortcomings that contribute to classroom inequities, encompassing factors like race, gender, class, disabilities, and language. Equally important is a clear understanding of the systemic power imbalances that sustain these disparities. Educators who are socially and politically conscious employ design thinking and interdisciplinary pedagogy as tools for direct action, striving to reform unjust systems.

We invite you to join us for an interactive session designed to apply the principles of design thinking. Through engaging activities and discussions, participants will delve into identifying educational inequities in mathematics education, recognizing implicit biases, exploring the influence of social structures on educational disparities, and acquiring foundational tools for initiating meaningful change and promoting justice in education.

Learning Goals

• Build a framework of design principles & tools that can be used as a basis for future interdisciplinary pedagogical design
• Create an action plan tailored to innovating educational change on an issue that holds significance to them
• (optional) Become a part of an ongoing community of teachers aimed to further support teachers in implementing design thinking to promote educational change and justice within their classrooms and schools. The six follow-up sessions during the 2024-25 school year will feature a panel of local secondary teachers (Mathematics, social studies, generalists) from public and alternative schools in the greater Madison area, actively leading educational transformation efforts despite existing inequities in mathematics education.

NOTE: Participants will need to have a personal phone or tablet to use during this workshop to use the Octostudio App. The app can be downloaded for iOS or Android here: https://octostudio.org/

In this workshop, participants will have the opportunity to tinker with block-based computer programming and physical materials. Computational Tinkering, an idea from the MIT Media Lab and the Exploratorium, is exploring physical and digital materials to try out new ideas, iterate, imagine new possibilities, and develop as creative thinkers.
In this workshop we will use OctoStudio, a free phone or tablet based coding app that allows you to create stories, animations, and games. You'll use the app on your personal device (downloaded from the Google Play or iOS app store) or share with a colleague.

Learning Goals

• Explore computational tinkering, engaging with computational and computer science ideas in a playful and iterative way.
• Try out OctoStudio, a free digital creation tool that can be use in a variety of contexts and subject areas.