Summer Institute

More people are good at math than manage to succeed in math at school. This assumption, drawn from my own experiences as a high school teacher, educational scholar, and mathematician, grounds my work. For this reason, I center my research on ways to make authentic mathematics accessible to students, particularly those who have been historically marginalized by our educational system. I focus primarily on mathematics teaching in two ways. First, I look at classroom practices that engage the most students in high-quality mathematics. Second, viewing teaching as a contextually embedded practice, I am interested in how school environments, communities, colleagues, and policies shape what is instructionally possible. All of this is unified through a pursuit to understand teacher learning as a situative phenomenon. In these ways, my scholarship lies at the intersection of mathematics education, learning sciences, and the sociology of teachers’ work.

Featured Speaker Session Description

Designing Motivational Mathematics Classrooms

Often, teachers encounter students who struggle to engage with mathematical learning and feel frustrated with their lack of motivation. What if motivation was not entirely a property of individual students but something that educators can design for? In this presentation, I share what I have learned by bringing the psychology of motivation to understand the work of effective mathematics teachers. Specifically, I share how they create motivational mathematics classrooms by focusing on belongingness, meaningfulness, competence, accountability, and autonomy, inviting participants to re-imagine aspects of their own teaching to support students’ mathematical motivation.