Promoting Productive Struggle That Leads to Understanding

Workshop overview

In this workshop, participants will participate in discussions and activities that focus on visualization and conceptual development of mathematics to help students think deeply about mathematical ideas and relationships.

Participants will explore:

• How to provide #SlowMath opportunities for all students to notice and wonder “what if” and “why"
• How to use TI technology to promote productive struggle

By the end of the workshop, participants should be able to say, I can:

• Invoke #SlowMath for students to engage in productive struggle to show what they know in more than one way
• Recognize the difference between productive struggle and destructive struggle
• Recognize #AskDontTell opportunities to “unstuck” students
• Anticipate how students will solve tasks and expect use of multiple representations to deepen mathematics understanding

Participants will join in discussions and activities focused on:

• Demonstrating math flexibility to show what they know in more than one way
• Facilitating meaningful mathematical discourse so that students can look for and make use of structure to reason
• Analyzing different pathways, finding connections between pathways, and adding new strategies to their thinking
• Recognizing when students are undergoing destructing struggle and need #AskDontTell prompting to become “unstuck”

Pricing and technology options

$200 — Workshop registration without TI technology package

$250 — Workshop registration plus one of the following TI technology packages:

• TI-Nspire™ CX II graphing calculator and TI-Nspire™ CX Premium Teacher Software
• TI-Nspire™ CX II CAS graphing calculator and TI-Nspire™ CX Premium Teacher Software
• TI-84 Plus CE graphing calculator and TI-SmartView™ CE emulator software for the TI-84 Plus graphing family

Team discount: Register four educators for this workshop, and the fifth attends free.

This workshop may be combined with workshops at the same location for an additional registration fee of $100 per day:

• Teaching Strategies for Success in a Mathematics Classroom (June 23)
• Implementing Tasks That Promote Reasoning and Problem-Solving in Mathematics Classrooms (June 25)