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The Making Sense of Mathematics for Teaching series is now available!

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In addition, we offer a wide range of professional learning experiences, from department and school-wide presentations to district-wide workshops, as well as coaching and support to small groups of teachers. We work with teachers in general education as well as special education and ESOL. We believe that effective teacher change begins with teachers making sense of important mathematical concepts first as learners and moves to teachers applying the learning from those experiences to impact their teaching practices.

Our vision for professional learning is to build a solid foundation of content knowledge for teaching mathematics and ultimately to extend that knowledge to students through the implementation of the Teaching-Assessing-Learning (Dixon, Adams, & Nolan, 2015). This Cycle is built upon the framework that collaborative teams need to identify learning targets and design common tasks and assessments to use in teaching. Teachers collect data and reflect as a team as they are assessing student learning. Topics that will be addressed in professional learning include:

* Focusing on important mathematical content in the appropriate grades from PreK to Grade 12
* Implementing Mathematical Practices
* Understanding elements of lesson design
* Developing mathematics action plans within a Professional Learning Community (PLC) culture
* Developing and analyzing a formative assessment process
* Developing and maintaining high cognitive demand tasks
* Preparing and implementing common assessments (with potential 4-day follow up institute)
* Using data-driven decision-making in instruction and assessment (with potential 4-day follow up institute)

There is a strong call for building teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge for teaching mathematics. A lack of a “deep understanding of the content that [teachers] are expected to teach may inhibit their ability to teach meaningful, effective, and connected lesson sequences, regardless of the materials that they have available” (Leinwand et al., 2014, p. 71). It is well accepted that teachers need a foundation of strong pedagogical content knowledge to teach effectively (Shulman, 1986). Pedagogical content knowledge “goes beyond knowledge of subject matter per se to the dimension of subject matter knowledge for teaching . . .of the particular form of content knowledge that embodies the aspects of content most germane to its teachability” (p. 9). As Hill, Rowan, and Ball (2005) found with early elementary students, “teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching positively predicted student gains in mathematics achievement” (p. 399). Dixon Nolan Adams Mathematics provides strategies grounded in twenty years of personal research and experience as well as through implementation of professional development in districts across the country. Professional learning with Dixon Nolan Adams Mathematics transforms teaching and advances learning through a focus on developing teachers’ content knowledge with an emphasis on building student understanding.

Information regarding Dr. Dixon’s presentations in Wisconsin.

 

Questions? What to learn more? Please let us know at contact@DNAMath.com.