Discourse

The main goal of this session is to share and get feedback on materials from a 40-hour professional development program for elementary mathematics, focusing in particular on the organization of facilitation supports included in these materials. The PD was designed to help teachers promote discourse in elementary mathematics classrooms. In particular, it defines and helps teachers implement “responsive” discourse in the classroom, that is, discourse in which all students are responsible for learning and engaged in probing each other’s mathematical ideas.

The three panelists in this session are in the last one or two years of their game-based learning projects, and all have done extensive work in supporting use of their games in classroom learning. As their work has progressed, each has discovered valuable ways to support teachers as well as encountered surprises in what teachers wanted (and didn’t want), and now recognize things they wished they had learned in the beginning of their projects. Session participants leave with recommendations they can use in their current projects, including:

How can tools for teachers foster high-leverage classroom discourse and assessment practices?