2010 Future Leader Initial NCTM Annual Meeting Attendance Awards Recipient

Teaching: Building the Connections 

As a teacher at a high poverty urban public school, I have come to see the vital need for students to construct their own conceptual understanding and build their own connections between math topics and their own lives. With this goal in mind, I collaborated with colleagues, using a Japanese professional development methodology called Lesson Study, to discuss our instructional practices in more depth.  I wish to attend the NCTM annual meeting in order to share my experiences with Lesson Study, and learn from the thoughts and experiences of other teachers from across the nation. I hope to return from this conference with a better understanding about how to build student understanding through reasoning and sense making and therefore be better able to advocate for these ideas, and enlist stronger and longer lasting support from my school administration, my students, and their parents.