Sweet Briar College
Summer 2007
Summer 2007 Workshops | Home

Course Title: Number and Operations

Credit: 1 graduate credit hour

Instructors:

Class Dates:
June 26th , June 27th , June 28th

Course Description:
This course is designed to engage participants in thinking through the major ideas of K-8 mathematics and examine how children develop those ideas. Participants will read and discuss cases and videos, share and discuss student work, conduct and analyze interviews of their own students, write their own cases, and read overviews of related research. This work will be tied to the Virginia Standards of Learning (SOLs) and the standards from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). Instruction will cover:

• numbers, ways of representing numbers, relationships among numbers, and number systems
• meanings of operations and how they relate to each other
• computational fluency and reasonable operations
• the development of pedagogical knowledge of number

Course Objectives:

1. The teacher will develop his or her professional competence, confidence and enthusiasm for the teaching and learning of mathematics.
2. The teacher will deepen his or her understanding of children's mathematical learning of number and operations grades K-12, in the spirit of the NCTM reform documents.
3. The teacher will develop classroom strategies for planning and teaching mathematics; knowing how to select appropriate mathematical tasks, asking productive questions, giving useful explanations, and evaluating student work.
4. The teacher will select and use manipulatives to connect the concrete phase of mathematical learning to the abstract, symbolic phase of learning.
5. The teacher will use course readings to become knowledgeable about the recommendations of various members of the education community for content and curricular knowledge of school mathematics.
6. The teacher will take responsibility for his or her own professional growth and contribute to the field of mathematics education.

Assignments:
•  Reading and discussion of cases
•  Analyzing student work samples
•  Reading and discussion of assigned articles
•  Solving mathematical problems

Grades will be based on: