Summer Institute
Introduction
2025 MCMI Virtual Summer Institute: Motivation Matters
July 24, 2025 with Featured Speaker Dr. Ilana Horn
Join us via Zoom from 9:00–2:30 for a day of virtual learning for K–12 math educators and administrators.
Do you hear crickets or experience avoidance to your carefully planned lesson? Participation in math class feels socially risky to students; silence often feels safer. You can create a learning environment where students want to join in. Dr. llana Seidel Horn will kick off the day by exploring the five factors that lower the risks and raise the benefits of participation: Belongingness, Meaningfulness, Competence, Accountability, and Autonomy. The learning will continue with breakout sessions led by MCMI coaches and teacher leaders from the region.
For schools/districts participating in MCMI services for SY24/25 or SY25/26, registration costs are covered by the terms of your contract. Please contact Jean Sutow-Goldrich (sutow@uic.edu) with questions about your MCMI status.
View Choice Session Information Here
Register Now on Eventbrite
Meet Our Featured Speaker, Dr. Ilana Horn
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.