Conference Strands

All sessions, workshops, and bursts are submitted to unique topic strands developed by the Program Committee:

Designing Learning Experiences

The Designing Learning Experiences strand offers opportunities to inform effective teaching practice. This strand focuses on the intersection among worthwhile tasks, purposeful questioning, and supporting productive struggle with a focus on mathematical processes and practices. Sessions in this strand will explore how effective teaching can move students toward deeper understanding of important mathematical ideas.

Dismantling Barriers: Promoting Equity and Access

Sessions in this strand will focus on dismantling barriers that have kept students from using mathematics to improve their own lives and the lives of their communities. Participants will examine structural barriers (e.g., racism, sexism, language barriers, lack of accommodations, and others) that disproportionately impact students' and their communities' experience of learning mathematics, on a personal, classroom, school, district, state, or national level. Sessions may focus on engaging in the cultures, communities, and families of our students to improve classroom outcomes as well as on examining instructional practice and programs that are effective for all students, and in particular students who may have been denied access to educational opportunities in any way for any reason, which has limited their mathematics learning.

A Student's Journey in Mathematics

A sound mathematics curriculum develops coherently throughout a students' school journey. A robust curriculum also encompasses solid mathematical practices while connecting and engaging students with mathematics in the real world, empowering students and improving their lives by building their critical reasoning skills. Sessions in this strand will address these components of a mathematics curriculum as well as address the question "How can teachers be supported in keeping their students' journey coherent within curriculum restraints?"

Intentional, Effective Use of Tools and Technology

Technology and tools are powerful resources in the math classroom when they are used purposefully to promote sense making, reasoning, and communication among students. The sessions in this strand will explore the use of tools and technology to give students access to meaningful problems, promote student discourse, encourage mathematical curiosity and inquiry, and visualize and understand mathematical ideas.

Assessment

Assessments should drive everything that happens in classrooms, including the choices teachers make about instruction and tasks. Teachers, teacher leaders, math specialists/coaches, researchers, and administrators all have roles to play in designing, supporting, and making use of effective and efficient assessment practices. Assessment includes testing but is much more than that. Sessions in this strand will address questions such as: What supports do teachers need in order to use student thinking in their planning and instruction? How can we get better at assessing things like students' dispositions, thinking, and reasoning skills (mathematical practices)? How can we get better at assessing the extent to which our tasks meet our goals, engage our students in thinking deeply, and so on? How can we get better at using assessments to inform students about their learning?

Professionalism: Building Capacity, Collaboration, and Leadership

This strand is for all math educators—teachers, principals, coaches, specialists, researchers, and professors. What practices, structures, and supports empower teachers to develop their craft? Sessions in this strand will explore topics such as growing leaders within schools, districts, and regions; establishing and supporting professional learning communities; leveraging our positions to advocate for all our students; and developing mathematical and pedagogical knowledge for all teachers.

STEM: Where's the M?

In this strand, mathematics is not subordinate. Minimally, high-quality STEM instruction requires deep content and pedagogical-content knowledge in mathematics, as well as the ability to integrate and make connections among the sciences while incorporating technology and the processes of engineering in rich, real-world contexts and applications. In essence, STEM teaching is quality teaching and learning where students are engaged in significant real-world explorations, problem solving, and mathematical modeling. The focus of this strand will involve non-trivial mathematics integrated with Science, Technology, Engineering, and perhaps other disciplines.