Conference Strands

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

Teaching Practices That Promote Learning 

Presentations will provide opportunities for participants to identify, explore, and/or develop instructional strategies and mathematical tasks that foster curiosity, support sense-making and reasoning, and promote discourse.

Empowering Diverse Mathematical Learners: Access and Equity

Sessions in this strand will focus on equitable and responsive instructional practices in mathematics that empower diverse learners. Sessions will focus on issues related to student agency, identity, power, culture, and language within the mathematics classroom. In addition, participants will explore social justice mathematics lessons, tasks, and activities that facilitate deeper understandings of mathematics, promote critical questions, and provide rich and rigorous opportunities for diverse learners. Read NCTM’s position on access and equity in mathematics education.

Students with Disabilities: Challenging Assumptions and Fostering Personal Agency

Sessions in this strand will challenge assumptions and deficit thinking around teaching students with disabilities. Sessions will highlight instructional practices and strategies that help students with disabilities learn math to high levels, develop a sense of personal agency, and build confidence as learners and doers of mathematics. Discover NCTM’s position on closing the opportunity gap for all students.

Making the Math Curriculum Come Alive

Examine instructional materials aligned to college and career ready standards with an eye towards mathematical practices. Sessions will stress the importance of clear learning progressions with high cognitive demand for all learner

Technology and Tools

In these sessions, presenters will address the purposeful implementation of technology using appropriate tools to help students experience, communicate and generalize mathematical ideas.

Assessment: A Tool for Purposeful Planning and Instruction 

Sessions in this strand will focus on assessment practices that provide and make use of evidence of student learning. Sessions in this strand will help teachers collect evidence from a variety of sources and use this data to inform the design of future learning experiences and feedback given to/by learners.

Professionalism: Personal and Collective Growth  

Sessions in this strand will focus on creating and promoting learning experiences for teachers to foster mathematical success for all students. Examples include professional development, coaching, virtual and face-to-face professional learning communities, lesson study, book circles, reflections and writing.

Children Doing Mathematics 

This strand will explore the mathematics that children are inspired to engage in organically, often beyond the walls of the classroom. Presentations will focus on supporting teachers to connect those intuitive, mathematical learning experiences and empower teachers to leverage that joyful and natural engagement in their mathematics instruction.