Math Place - Math Place for Professional Learning

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The Question text: How can teachers use Math Place as a professional learning tool?

Diane Stang, lead author sits at a table with the Math Place product.

Diane Stang says: When I started to develop Math Place, I think one of the most important things for me was making sure that it was a professional learning resource as well. And this is because the research indicates that teachers really need to have that math content knowledge for teaching and this doesn’t mean they’re not successful in their own lives in math. It has nothing to do with that. This has to be about understanding the math in such a way that you can impart that and help students understand the math. So you need to understand the big ideas, you have to know how they fit together, and you have to also understand how students learn along a developmental trajectory. So what we’ve done throughout Math Place is we’ve put in every lesson a section and it’s called ‘About the Math’ and basically in a couple of paragraphs we’re trying to explain what the math is all about, what in the lesson is really important to highlight, and we’re trying to give this information so after the lesson is done and the teacher is consolidating those ideas, she knows exactly or he knows exactly what to highlight in there, what to synthesize and what connections to make. We also mention several researchers, many of which are Canadian and we keep the citations in there and the reason we do that is we want teachers to have access to those resources if they want to go further on a topic. 

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