Elementary

Although teacher education is the formal means by which novices are prepared for teaching, they come having already had significant experience in schools. Preservice teachers have formed habits of “teaching” which influence their learning to teach. This article reports a study of the specific knowledge of and skills with teaching practice that novices bring to teacher education with respect to one teaching practice, eliciting student thinking in elementary mathematics, and describes the use of a standardized teaching simulation to learn about novices’ skills.

Cunningham, C. M., & Kelly, G. J. (2017). Framing Engineering Practices in Elementary School Classrooms. International Journal of Engineering Education, 33(1B), 295–307.

We describe a four-step strategy used in our professional development program to help elementary science teachers recognize and create lesson plans with coherent conceptual storylines. The conceptual storyline of a lesson refers to sequencing its scientific concepts and activities to help students develop a main scientific idea and, often, is an implicit component of a lesson plan.

Measurement is paired with data as a fundamental domain of K–grade 5 mathematics in the Common Core State Standards, and it is one of five core content areas in NCTM’s Principles and Standards for School Mathematics. This book presents lively activities that dovetail with standards and research-based stages of development to support students’ steady growth of understanding of measurement.

This article summarizes how a group of undergraduate regional university faculty built a program for rigorous and research-based science teacher preparation at the elementary level—namely, the “Model of Research-Based Education for Teachers” (MORE for Teachers). First, we discuss the research upon which the program is built: (1) a preparation infrastructure that includes rigorous content, focused teaching methods, and integrated field experiences with an emphasis on quality mentoring from cooperating teachers and (2) a conceptual framework for how people learn science.

To make sense of the Common Core State Standards mathematical practice (MP) 8, this article illustrates what “repeated reasoning” means, why looking for and expressing regularity in it is such a valuable mathematical habit of mind, and how that differs from analyzing structure (MP 7) and from finding patterns in numerical results. 

This article presents an instructional strategy called Mathematical Bet Lines that was designed to promote classroom discourse and sense-making for all students, in particular English Language Learners.  Introduced in Project AIM (All Included in Mathematics), a 40 hour professional development program focused promoting meaningful mathematical discourse, the Mathematical Bet Lines strategy supports comprehension of story problems by having students articulate to themselves and others their predictions regarding what is happening in the problem as it is revealed one sentence at a time.  With