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Thanks to our partnership with ASU Prep in Arizona, Blueprint Math Fellows have access to the ASU Mary Lou Fulton School of Education Community Eucator Learning Hub. This links to nano courses and bundles to support you in subjects such as: math content development, child development, social and emotional learning, teaching strategies and many more!

If you are having trouble accessing your account on this site, you can reach out to Susie Hartline shartline@blueprintschools.org to get support in setting up your account.

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Beautification Program for Small Communities 

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Handbook for Community Improvement

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Directions - In Person Service Opportunities

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HandsOn Phoenix Calendar of Service Opportuniteis

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HandsOn Phoenix Calendar of Service Opportuniteis

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The opportunity calendar makes it easy to find volunteer opportunities scheduled for a specific day and time.

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BELOVED COMMUNITY

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Today, we commemorate the 51st anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death: his assassination by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee, where King was preparing to march on behalf of sanitation workers on strike. In marking this tragic anniversary, we also celebrate the U.S. Civil Rights Movement King did so much to advance. Indeed, most 21st-century Americans see King as a national hero; we regard his writings, speeches, and sermons as key documents of the expanding American experiment, and we honor his memory through monuments, parks, schools, a holiday, and the names of our boulevards.

As much as King has become an American champion and even a legend, we should also-and especially on this day-recall the international scope of his vision: how King's notion of "the beloved community" grew to encompass all the people of the world.

King refined his philosophy of nonviolent resistance to racial segregation, racist brutality, and injustice over many years, but even in the beginning, he saw the international dimensions of the civil rights struggle. In July of 1956, he gave a speech to the Home Mission Societies of Christian Friends in Green Lake, Wisconsin, while in the midst of the Montgomery bus boycott; the state statute requiring racial segregation on intrastate buses had just been overturned in district court, but the boycott continued and the case would not be decided by the U. S. Supreme Court until November of that year. With his feet in Wisconsin and his heart in Alabama, King nevertheless brought his mind and the minds of his listeners to global horizons: "Now this determination on the part of the Negro to struggle and to struggle, until segregation and discrimination have passed away, springs from the same longing for human dignity that motivates oppressed peoples all over the world. This is not only a nation in transition, but this is a world in transition." In a later version of the speech, King said that actions like "non-cooperation and boycotts are not ends within themselves... the end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of non-violence is the creation of a beloved community."

King drew on a variety of religious and philosophical sources as he developed the basic tenets of this philosophy. The non-aggression principle of , as popularized by Mahatma Gandhi, is the best known of these sources, as outlined in King's 1959 Sermon on Gandhi. He also benefited from the ideas of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an international interfaith group founded in 1914 in an attempt to prevent World War I; the U.S. chapter was attended by Josiah Royce, a theologian and philosopher who first articulated the idea of the beloved community. (Royce received one of the first doctorate degrees granted by Johns Hopkins in 1878. We have some of his early writings in the University Archives.) Over the years, King's description of the ideals and practices of nonviolent resistance grew more specific, as he and his brother and sister activists sought to implement it in their arduous and dangerous work.

In April 1957, when he gave his sermon on " The Birth of a New Nation," King's beloved community was explicitly global. In this speech, celebrating Ghana's successful fight for independence from British colonialism, he connected that struggle to the Indian independence movement and the U.S. struggle against segregation-and he invoked again the goal of a beloved community that leaves no one out. King's view of the beloved community also clearly embraces migrants to and from all nations. In a 1966 note to Cesar Chavez, leading farmworkers who were largely undocumented, King said, "Our separate struggles are really one-a struggle for freedom, for dignity and for humanity." And in his 1963 " Letter from Birmingham Jail," a response to local clergy who objected to "outsiders coming in," he issued perhaps his most eloquent defense of the beloved community as a global phenomenon: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." His murder interrupted the launch of the Poor People's Campaign, a multi-pronged crusade against U.S. poverty through policies to provide jobs, unemployment insurance, a fair minimum wage, and improved opportunities for education that was organized by over fifty multiracial organizations. While its immediate goals were national, its premise was transnational-a recognition that poverty at home was linked to economic and political power dynamics that created wealth and poverty everywhere.

In his last Sunday sermon, preached at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., King described the "great revolution" of his time in terms that are extraordinarily relevant to the networked, global dimensions of our lives in 2018. What was taking place in 1968, as he saw it, was "in a sense... a triple revolution; that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation; then there is a revolution of weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and nuclear weapon of warfare; then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world." He closed the sermon by reminding his listeners not to despair on the hard road to freedom, because "however dark it is, however deep the angry feelings are, and however violent the explosions," what we are capable of making is "a beautiful symphony of brotherhood."

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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Beloved Community

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Today, we commemorate the 51st anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s death: his assassination by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee, where King was preparing to march on behalf of sanitation workers on strike. In marking this tragic anniversary, we also celebrate the U.S. Civil Rights Movement King did so much to advance.

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What You Should Know About Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service:

The history behind MLK Day, and how you can celebrate it!

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What You Should Know About Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service

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The history behind MLK Day, and how you can celebrate it.

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This month we celebrate the life of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Here are some of our favorite Martin Luther King books and resources for introducing students to one of America's greatest heroes:

Books for the Classroom

Alternating spreads share details from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life story with imagined images of a classroom of children carrying out the principles he championed in present day. This would be an awesome whole-school read aloud with focused conversations at each grade level.

This is a touching biography of Dr. King penned by his son, Marty. While the rest of the world knew him as a powerful leader, at home he was "just Dad." This relatable tribute shares some meaningful, lesser-known examples of the King family's activism to promote nonviolence.

This is the story of Dr. King's childhood and rise to civil rights leader as only his sister could tell it - practical jokes and all.

4. I Have a Dream by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., illus. by Kadir Nelson (Grades K-5)

Caldecott Honor artist Kadir Nelson's stunning paintings scaffold students' understanding of of Dr. King's most famous speech. The book includes an audio recording for sharing with students as well.

This bookshelf staple-which uses Dr. King's own words paired with moving artwork to tell his life story-never fails to leave students awestruck.

This primer on the principles that drove Dr. King's work is an excellent springboard for conversations about applying his beliefs to our own lives.

7. Let the Children March by Monica Clark-Robinson, illustrated by Frank Morrison (Grades 1-5)

When a young girl hears Dr. King speak at her church, she's inspired to take action. This moving portrayal of the 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade offers students a unique perspective on children's involvement in the civil rights movement.

Written by a Parkland shooting survivor, this diverse list of influential activists puts Dr. King's legacy in a larger context. Plan for multiple readings so students can make use of the informative back matter to appreciate the full text.

Don't be fooled by the comic book style of this series - the text packs a lot of information key events in Dr. King's life and work. Use it alongside some of the more artful titles.

Kids are drawn to this reliably engaging biography series. Clearly written text with ample illustrations helps students understand how Dr. King's work came to be, and how it shaped history.

11. Martin Rising: Requiem for a King by Andrea Davis Pinkney, illustrated by Brian Pinkney (Grades 6 and up)

This unique anthology chronicles the winter and spring of 1968, leading up to Dr. King's assassination. Extensive back matter builds background knowledge for appreciating the arc of events depicted. This is an exceptional resource for framing meaningful discussions in middle and high school classrooms. Scholastic provides an exceptional discussion guide that includes additional reflections from the author and illustrator.

12. Dear Martin by Nic Stone (Grades 9 and up)

This intensely gripping novel stars Justyce, a high-achieving African American student whose life takes an unforgettable turn as a result of racial profiling. He turns to the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King to make sense of his experiences.

This helpful volume contains a collection of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s most important writings and speeches, chosen by teachers.

Online Teaching Resources
What are your favorite Martin Luther King books for the classroom? Come and share in our WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook. Plus, great Martin Luther King activities and quotes.

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13 Classroom Books for Teaching About Martin Luther King Jr.

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This month we celebrate the life of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Here are some of our favorite Martin Luther King books and resources for introducing students to one of America's greatest heroes: Alternating spreads share details from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s life story with imagined images of a classroom of children carrying out the principles he championed in present day.

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On May 12, 2009, the U. S. Congress authorized a national initiative by passing The Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-19). The law dir...

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Here are six podcasts to listen to in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day

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Here are conversations from across public media to listen to as we reflect on the life and legacy of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

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Tour the Coretta Scott King exhibit virtually

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In partnership with Microsoft, The King Center’s Coretta Scott King Rose Gallery celebrates the extraordinary life and legacy of Coretta Scott King. As a civil rights activist, peace advocate, author, and wife of Martin Luther King, Jr., Mrs. King played a pivotal role in carrying forth the message of peace, justice and equality. She dedicated her life to human rights advocacy and was a champion for women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, economic justice, and nonviolent social change.

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Listen to the complete speeches of Martin Luther King Jr and reflect on their relevance and messages

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Speeches by Martin Luther King: The Ultimate Collection

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Speeches by Martin Luther King: The Ultimate Collection

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Sign up to be a virtual tutor with UPchieve. The free, online platform connects low-income students in the U.S. with live, volunteer coaches.

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Flexible, virtual opportunities to provide online tutoring and college counseling to low-income students. Choose your schedule and your subjects!

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Help seniors feel less lonely. Letters Against Isolation serves thousands of seniors in the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia, and Israel.

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Volunteer to transcribe historical documents through the Smithsonian Digital Volunteer program.

The Library of Congress also has a transcription program with By the People. Founded in 2018, By the People is a volunteer initiative to improve search, readability, and access to handwritten and typed documents for everyone, including people who are not fully sighted.

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910 Contributions

Lee Ya-Ching was a flying Good Will Ambassador for United China Relief during World War II. The daughter of a Hong Kong industrialist, Lee Ya-Ching attended school in England in 1933 and she began her flight training at Switzerland's Cointrin-Ecole d'Aviation, obtaining the first pilot's license ever granted by the school to a woman. She later continued her training at the Boeing School of Aviation, in Oakland, California. In 1936, Lee Ya-Ching returned to China where she made an air survey of 30,000 miles for the Chinese Army and was appointed instructor of the Shanghai Municipal Air School until the outbreak of war caused the school to close. From 1938 until 1943, Lee Ya-Ching flew across the United States and then Latin America soliciting funds for the benefit of Chinese war victims. Note: Please do not describe the images, photographs, or maps that appear in this project. We are only seeking transcriptions.

1,202 Contributions

Zarina Hashmi (1937-2020), known professionally as Zarina, was a New York-based artist specializing in printmaking, drawing, and sculpture. Born in Aligarh, India, Zarina studied mathematics before discovering printmaking and papermaking in the 1960s. She studied intaglio with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris, and woodblock printing at Toshi Yoshida Studio in Tokyo. Through her art, Hashmi explored themes of geographical and social borders, migration, and home, often incorporating text in her native Urdu.

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910 Contributions Lee Ya-Ching was a flying Good Will Ambassador for United China Relief during World War II. The daughter of a Hong Kong industrialist, Lee Ya-Ching attended school in England in 1933 and she began her flight training at Switzerland's Cointrin-Ecole d'Aviation, obtaining the first pilot's license ever granted by the school to a woman.

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Check out some of the following books from your local library, OR ask your Site Manager if they have access to a physical copy they can lend you!

In Other words - phrases for growth mindset by Annie Brock and Heather Hundley

So you want to talk about race? by Ijeoma Oluo

Daring Greatly by Brene Brown

The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice by Fania E. Davis

In the Crossfire by John P. Spencer

Mindset by Carol Dweck

Better by Mistake by Alina Tugend

Limitless Mind by Jo Boaler

Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond

Mathematical Mindset by Jo Boaler

Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

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Check out some of the following books from your local library, OR ask your Site Manager if they have access to a physical copy they can lend you!

Whole Brained Child by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson

In Other words - phrases for growth mindset by Annie Brock and Heather Hundley

Daring Greatly by Brene Brown

The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice by Fania E. Davis

Practice Perfect by Doug Lemov

Making Number Talks Matter and Digging Deeper by Ruth Parker and Cathy Humphreys

Never Work Harder than your Students by Robyn R. Jackson

Better by Atul Gawande

Better by Mistake by Alina Tugend

Limitless Mind by Jo Boaler

Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Zaretta Hammond

Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov

Tilting your Teaching by Glen Pearsall

Mathematical Mindset by Jo Boaler

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Check out some of the following books from your local library, OR ask your Site Manager if they have access to a physical copy they can lend you!

The joy of x by Steven Strogatz

Making Number Talks Matter and Digging Deeper by Ruth Parker and Cathy Humphreys

Alex Bellos Math Books - Here's looking at Euclid, Think Twice, The Grapes of Math, Alex's Adventures in Numberland etc.

Limitless Mind by Jo Boaler

Mathematical Mindset by Jo Boaler

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Blog written by Blueprint Fellows and Leadership team members about the Blueprint Math Fellow experience. Would you like to be a contributor? Reach out to skirker@blueprintschools.org to set up a topic and timeline!

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The Blueprint Blog – BLUEPRINT SCHOOLS NETWORK, INC.

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I was born and raised in Nepal, the county with the highest peak in the world, Mt. Everest, and the birthplace of lord Gautam Buddha,…

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Directions - In Person Service Opportunities

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Directions - In Person Service Opportunities

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An official website of the United States government Here's how you know Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock A locked padlock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website.

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Serve with us! All you need is your Zip Code!

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An official website of the United States government

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Official websites use .gov
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An official website of the United States government Here's how you know Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock A locked padlock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website.

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Directions - In Person Service Opportunities

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To receive hours for completing a reading, listening to a podcast or watching a video linked in this padlet you need to turn in a (quick!) reflection form using the Reflection form linked below.

Any time spent on reading, watching, listening etc. and reflection should be added to your timesheet in ADP as "Independent Development"

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Reflection: What resonated with you the most after viewing this trailer?

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This method calls for students working in groups to create problems, point out common errors, find solutions, and then explain the process.

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A Collaborative Approach to Mistake Analysis. 

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A Collaborative Approach to Mistake Analysis. 

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This method calls for students working in groups to create problems, point out common errors, find solutions, and then explain the process.

Courtesy of Emma Chiappetta

"Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others." The Common Core asserts, "Mathematically proficient students are also able to compare the effectiveness of two plausible arguments, distinguish correct logic or reasoning from that which is flawed, and-if there is a flaw in an argument-explain what it is."

"Attend to precision. Mathematically proficient students try to communicate precisely to others."

"Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning. As they work to solve a problem, mathematically proficient students maintain oversight of the process, while attending to the details. They continually evaluate the reasonableness of their intermediate results."

Many math teachers use mistake analysis as an instructional strategy for helping students to think metacognitively and to develop a deeper understanding of critical procedures. The approach that I will share takes this strategy to the next level by getting students up out of their seats, working collaboratively, and thinking critically about common misconceptions. The activity requires students to not only identify an error but also reflect on their own learning to generate their own ideas of what the common mistakes are and then explain the thinking of their peers.

As you read through the procedure, think about how students are deeply engaging with each of these practices.

Here's how it works. Randomly separate the students into groups of three, and assign each group to a board. Each iteration of the exercise has three rounds.

3-Round Mistake Analysis Exercise

Round one: Each group of students is prompted to generate a problem related to the current unit of study in which one of their peers might make a mistake. They write the problem and solve it incorrectly, intentionally performing the common error that they identified but without noting where the error occurs in the solution.

Round two: Each group rotates to the next board, so that they are looking at a problem and an incorrect solution generated by the previous group. Using a different color marker, they must identify the error in the solution and solve the problem correctly.

Round three: Each group rotates again so that now they are looking at a problem, an incorrect solution, and a correct solution, none of which were written by the group currently standing at that board. They verbally explain to the rest of the class the mistake that was made by the first group and the correct solution provided by the second group.

Benefits for Students

There are a slew of benefits to this approach. My favorite is that students must do several different types of thinking.

Generating an example of a common misconception requires a great deal of metacognition on their part. Identifying an error is an exercise in precision and critical evaluation of a process. Next, they flex their problem-solving skills. Finally, they need to construct an argument and explain someone else's solution. Thinking about the same content from all of these perspectives and modalities encourages a much deeper understanding of the material.

Another aspect of this protocol that I love is that every student has an entry point. Struggling students can reflect on a mistake they have made on a previous assignment, while high-flying students can think critically about a subtle mistake that might stump their classmates.

This collaborative approach to mistake analysis is a fabulous way to facilitate teamwork in a math classroom that, again, allows students at all levels to participate. Even the students struggling the most will be able to talk about what mistakes they have made and what types of problems are most challenging to them. Adding an additional requirement, that only one student may wield the writing utensil during each round, also forces everyone to participate and communicate.

Finally, the multifaceted stages of the exercise boost energy levels in the room. The buzz in the room is palpable as students move from one board to the next, brainstorm, debate, and change their thinking modality. Plus, I've always been a strong believer that we think better when we are standing up and writing big!

This strategy can be used at any stage in the learning process: near the beginning of a unit to nip misconceptions in the bud, in the middle when students are in the thick of formative assessment, or at the end as a review exercise. While I've found success using it in the math classroom, I imagine it could be adapted for any discipline. For example, English teachers might have students generate sentences with subtle but common grammatical errors. The possibilities are endless.

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A Collaborative Approach to Mistake Analysis

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This method calls for students working in groups to create problems, point out common errors, find solutions, and then explain the process.

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As schools nationwide contend with declining math scores, some districts are dedicating more time to the practice of foundational skills.

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Should More Time Be Spent Learning Math Facts? 

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Should More Time Be Spent Learning Math Facts? 

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It's the end of math class at Forest Hills Elementary School in Sidman, Pennsylvania, and after a short break, fourth-grade teacher Dawn McCall's students are getting down to business-with an additional 20 minutes of math work.

McCall's students know the routine: They pair off with a partner-usually a higher-performing student and a lower-performing one-and work through short sets of problems together that target weak or missing skills, like multidigit subtraction or multiplication. One student solves the problem while describing their thinking aloud; the other student offers support and highlights mistakes. Then they switch roles.

This is SpringMath, a short and intensive math intervention that McCall's school is implementing for all students, regardless of their achievement levels. The targeted daily practice is designed to strengthen foundational skills, and it's rapidly putting grade-level math mastery within reach for a lot more students, according to McCall. "To succeed at fractions and decimals, you have to know your multiplication and division facts," McCall said. "If you know those multiplication and division facts, things like reducing fractions is going to be a lot easier. It's that little extra bit of practice every day."

Since Forest Hills Elementary began implementing the math intervention at the beginning of 2018-slowly adding a few grades at a time, beginning with fourth through sixth grade-student test scores for some participating groups have steadily improved, according to assistant superintendent Dr. Rob Dill. In 2022, 56 percent of fourth graders at the school scored proficient or advanced on the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment state test; by fifth grade, 76 percent of those same students scored proficient or above. Meanwhile, math achievement across the nation is headed in the opposite direction. Only 36 percent of fourth graders scored proficient in math on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) after a historic five-point drop following pandemic school closures. For the decade before that, scores had hovered around only 40 percent proficiency. Eighth-grade achievement dropped even more-down eight points from 2019, with only 26 percent of students scoring proficient; 40 percent scored below basic.

Now, a growing number of researchers, school leaders, and educators are calling attention to research-based solutions to combat slippage in math, including the crucial role that adequate practice time plays in student performance. "They are considered dirty words, but drill and practice, and explicit instruction on how to procedurally solve math problems, are evidence-based strategies that work," said SUNY University at Albany math researcher Ben Solomon. There's often a misconception that rote math practice is dull and uninteresting, but "think about how adults thought phonics was boring, but kids actually feel awesome when they can be successful at learning to read," said University of Winnipeg professor of mathematics Anna Stokke. "It's the same with math. Teaching foundational math skills does not need to be mindless and boring. Adults who have already mastered a topic don't view things with the same sense of excitement that kids do. Kids get excited about math when they feel successful, regardless of the topic."

The Fluency Question

A key missing ingredient in higher math achievement is math fluency, especially in the basic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Research shows that fluency in these foundational skills is critical to math performance and achievement, but experts and educators say there's a disconnect between how much practice students need to achieve fluency-especially students who struggle with math-and how much they often get in classrooms. The National Mathematics Advisory Panel includes the importance of practice in basic operations among its top findings and recommendations-"Computational proficiency with whole number operations is dependent on sufficient and appropriate practice to develop automatic recall," the authors write-yet schools and teachers say that, for a variety of reasons, students aren't getting enough practice to solidify foundational concepts.

Researchers like Solomon say that memorizing multiplication tables, timed practice with feedback, and the dreaded worksheet of problems actually matter to long-term math achievement because they help students build the kind of domain knowledge in foundational skills needed to perform more complex math-and that some kinds of math practice are better than others. Evidence shows that procedural and conceptual understanding go hand in hand and are mutually reinforcing, but experts say that in many classrooms an overcorrection has been made that puts too much focus on conceptual understanding at the expense of procedure. "Conceptual understanding really has been overemphasized to the point that students don't have procedural skills," Stokke said.

Lack of procedural skill often keeps students from ever reaching the creative, open-ended side of math. "We need to give them the basic tools and then play with them in many different ways so they can explore the beauty of math," said cognitive scientist Daniel Ansari, professor and Canada research chair at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. "But first they need the basic building blocks."

Obstacles to practice time

Math practice gets shortchanged for a constellation of reasons-an overstuffed curriculum and the drive to cover an overwhelming number of standards; test-prep pressure; and instructional philosophies that consider repetitive practice, sometimes negatively referred to as "rote" or "drill and kill," to be uniformly harmful and to be avoided at all costs.

When Lee Williams, mom to two middle school students in Williamson County, Tennessee, checks in on their homework, she said, the most notable thing is that they're moving through math at lightning speed-a common refrain among parents interviewed for this story. Both kids are tackling complex concepts in math class, yet they haven't mastered the fundamentals of arithmetic that make learning more challenging topics possible. "They move to a new topic every week in elementary and don't ever master the basic functions," she said. "They start with algebraic concepts before they even have multiplication and division facts at the ready-in third grade."

In classrooms, teachers say there's just not enough time for extra practice. Pressured to cover every state standard with equal emphasis, they often can't spend extra time on fundamentals like memorizing multiplication tables, or even on the standards themselves. "It's a huge problem," said Sarah Powell, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who researches math instruction and trains teachers. Some districts go so far as to put out a calendar dictating what every teacher should be working on every week of the year-regardless of how far along (or behind) their students are in the curriculum, Powell noted. "We have trapped ourselves with having so many expectations; at each grade level there are these standards, and you are supposed to cover these 30 things and not let anything go," she said.

But when it comes to standards, it's important to recognize that they're not all of equal importance, said Phil Daro, who helped write the Common Core math standards. Some of the fundamentals, such as single-digit addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division for the youngest students, are critical to spend ample time teaching and have kids practice. "Students need to know foundational math facts fluently," Daro said. "Practice needs to focus on the foundational skills. If you fill that practice bucket with more and more stuff, that will dilute the amount of time and effort available for practicing the real foundation."

Adding to the problem, researchers say that popular math curricula, and even some teacher training programs, de-emphasize practice's crucial role in math learning. "Many of the newer textbooks don't provide enough practice problems," said Doug Rohrer, a professor and math education researcher at the University of South Florida.

Where does practice belong?

A few years ago, SpringMath founder Amanda VanDerHeyden overheard a tutoring session where a student was trying to divide 148 by 3. Instead of doing long division, the student skip-counted by 3s all the way to 148, which didn't work out evenly. After several more attempts, the student finally arrived at the correct solution. "The student has the horsepower, he conceptually understands," she thought to herself at the time. "But he has been deprived of the most efficient way to get there."

Like learning any skill, after students learn a particular concept like long division, in order to consolidate that learning and reproduce it in the most efficient way possible, they have to practice until it becomes second nature. But because learning isn't a linear process, students should regularly be moving between foundational skills and application, with teachers frequently planning tasks that encourage retrieval of that material in a variety of ways. In most math classrooms, says VanDerHeyden, students are required to stop working on a skill too soon, cutting short valuable opportunities for repetition and limiting their ability to lock the learning into long-term memory.

SpringMath is based on a learning framework called the instructional hierarchy, a framework for how students acquire new skills that includes four distinct stages, including acquisition, fluency, generalization, and adaptation. According to this model (and there are a variety of learning frameworks), teaching looks different in the acquisition stage when students are brand-new to a concept, compared with when students can take a skill like long division and adapt it to other things, like complex story problems. A deeper awareness of how learning works, said University of Florida school psychology assistant professor Kathrin Maki, makes it easier to use techniques like inquiry learning at optimal times-but not when kids haven't yet had enough practice to adapt new skills to new problems.

"Inquiry learning isn't necessarily bad," said Maki. "It's that those techniques are only helpful when kids have basic, prerequisite skills. Something we struggle with in math instruction is trying to implement those [inquiry-based] techniques too soon. Kids who are in the acquisition and proficiency stages, those are kids who need a lot of repeated practice and explicit instruction."

The goal of practice is to move foundational skills into long-term memory so they become quick and automatic. Since math constantly builds new skills on top of existing ones, it's "relentlessly hierarchical," said Maki, and once foundational skills like addition and multiplication facts are locked into long-term memory, learning new, more complex math skills like multiplying fractions gets easier; working memory doesn't have to work so hard. "Long-term memory is effectively limitless; that's our superpower," said researcher and teacher Greg Ashman. "Things that are extremely hard to do when you're a novice become easy when you've got lots of stuff in your long-term memory."

Best practice for practice

Improving math fluency doesn't necessarily require endless hours of drilling, research shows. Short but frequent bursts, using a variety of retrieval practice strategies-think flash cards and brain dumps, for example, that get students to identify what they know about a concept, thus strengthening long-term retention-are more effective than longer, less frequent practice. "Teachers tend to focus on getting info into students' heads," said cognitive scientist Pooja Agarwal, coauthor of Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning. "But a big component of learning is getting the information out of our heads." Frequent low-stakes quizzes, entry and exit tickets, and some digital games, like FactFreaks, can offer effective retrieval practice.

Retrieval strategies like spaced practice, where students revisit concepts over a period of time with breaks in between, and interleaved practice, where mixing up different types of math problems helps students remember information better than when they work through long blocks of one type of problem, are strongly backed by the science of learning. Interleaving is so effective, University of Florida researcher Rohrer said, because students must decide which problem-solving strategy to use before solving. "In math textbooks, students don't have a chance to choose a strategy because a typical math assignment is devoted to a single concept," he said. "Which means that they usually know the strategy for each problem before they even read it." Interleaving, however, "gives students a chance to learn what they need to know."

In the Forest Hills school district in Pennsylvania, assistant superintendent Dill said a series of evidence-based reforms, including a new curriculum, have rewired how the district teaches math from kindergarten to high school-but the importance of the extra daily practice can't be understated. "Kids who are now fourth- and fifth-graders, they've been doing this for a few years," Dill said of the intervention. "And their skill development is far better than we've ever seen before." And in McCall's classroom, she's seeing overall math confidence blossom. "They know they can do it," she said. "They've learned those math facts."

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Should More Time Be Spent Learning Math Facts?

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As schools nationwide contend with declining math scores, some districts are dedicating more time to the practice of foundational skills.

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Consider these ideas for giving students meaningful praise that will encourage their learning.

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The Power of Compliments in the Math Classroom 

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The Power of Compliments in the Math Classroom 

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Consider these ideas for giving students meaningful praise that will encourage their learning.

Dobrila Vignjevic / iStock

When you see a student who is off task or having disruptive behavior, it can really draw your attention. Our brains are naturally wired to search for the negative or things not going right, especially in the math classroom, where the content can be so black and white, right or wrong.

There's a lot of research about how specific positive praise can decrease unwanted behavior. It might help even more to rewire our thinking to say that we can use specific positive praise, or compliments, to increase desired behaviors.

The recommended praise-to-reprimand ratio is 4:1, with about six praise statements for every 15 minutes. This may seem like a lot, but once you adjust your mindset to see the positive, you'll have access to unlimited opportunities, but these expected behaviors have to be carried out in a targeted way in order to have the most impact both academically and behaviorally.

4 Traits of Motivating Compliments

1. Compliments must be authentic and unexpected. This is one of the largest components that can dictate whether this effort is successful. Students can tell if compliments are disingenuous or an effort to control their behavior.Pulling up next to a child and observing them as they work for a moment before asking, "Can I give you a compliment?" is a great way to catch them off guard in the best of ways. Then once they are ready to receive it, make eye contact and point to where they've done what you noticed.

2. Compliments must be specificand observable. They must name the student or group and exactly what they were doing well. If compliments are vague, it can send an unclear message about which behavior you would like to be repeated. Instead of saying, "Good job on this problem," it will be easier for students to repeat what you want with a statement like, "Strong mathematicians label their representations with context like you did here on your strip diagram, when you labeled the trucks and that it was pumpkins in each truck."

3. Compliments must be timely. Feedback is always the most impactful when it occurs exactly when the behavior occurs. This allows the student, and any others nearby, to obtain true clarity. Here's what this could look like: "Sadie, you just read the problem again when your comprehension was unclear. That's a great strategy instead of guessing. You were being a self-aware mathematician!" If feedback is always given after work has been turned in, we can miss out on witnessing great behaviors that happen during the solving process.

4. Compliments must emphasize process, not ability. It's very important that the compliments be specific to a behavior that students can replicate. For example, praising a student's grit or thoughtfulness and how it has positively impacted their work is so much more powerful than saying someone is "good at math."

How to Increase the Value of a Compliment

In order to increase the validity of the intended change, you can also add on a value potential statement. This is a statement after the compliment that explains why it's important to continue the behavior.

Give compliments on abstract skills. If the student is persevering on a difficult math problem, you can say, "Wow, James.I see you're drawing a representation to help you understand the context. When you use representations, it helps to make relationships and patterns visible in complex problems. That's what good mathematicians do."

You can also give compliments on classroom management skills that impact the learning. This might look like, "Thank you so much, Dhanavi, for putting all of the pieces back where they go in the math station. That's so thoughtful as a member of our class. When you do this, the next group can get started right away and will have more time to learn."

Another type of compliment could be on specific content-related skills that you want students to continue. "Talli, your number line is drawn so accurately with equal spaces, labels, and appropriate intervals. This will help you be more efficient and accurate, especially next year when you use them to find equivalent fractions."

As you deliver these compliments, you shouldn't be afraid to show your excitement. This can be called "Making Students Famous." We want to celebrate students for what they're doing well; especially in a math classroom, where students may have anxiety or reservations about their ability, compliments can even create a positive physical reaction. You'll notice that students will be taken aback and even sit up straighter as they receive your feedback. Why is that? In a post on Individual Matters, psychologist Dr. Katrina Katen notes that "praise triggers the brain's release of dopamine: a 'feel good' neurotransmitter that is strongly associated with pleasure, reward, and motivation."

Getting Started

When you take this back to your classroom to try out, start with one math assignment or part of the math workshop. List a math behavior you want to focus on. As your students are working, call them by name, and celebrate that specific behavior and the value it will hold for them when they continue to do it.

Until it becomes natural to you, you can prepare using the following example.

Focus: Productive struggle

I can see that you are thinking so hard. You used the Three Reads routine and made notes for the important parts. That's what good mathematicians do! When you do this, it helps you to process difficult problems to find a way to get started.

I see that you made a mistake here and crossed it out before you found another way to solve. Sometimes mathematicians have to try ways that don't work to get to a strategy that does. When you aren't afraid to make mistakes, it helps you to take risks and build grit to accomplish great things. I admire that quality!

Wow, [student name]! I noticed you got a little overwhelmed by this problem, but you got up and took a walk, then came back and got right to work. When you do that, it sends oxygen to your brain and helps you think more clearly. That's a great strategy for when you get overwhelmed. I use that strategy sometimes too!

Behaviors to look for: Students making mistakes and trying a new way, students using resources around the room to get started, students not giving up

It can take a few tries to make this feel natural, but it's easy to buy into after you do it just once and see the reaction on one of your students' faces. Next time you're tempted to call out a reprimand, just scan the room for someone who is doing the desired behavior well, and give them the positive feedback they deserve. You will enhance your classroom culture in no time.

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The Power of Compliments in the Math Classroom

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To effectively harness the power of praising students in math class, consider these simple strategies for giving meaningful compliments.

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A monthly after-school activity guides students to have fun exploring science, technology, engineering, and math.

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A monthly after-school activity guides students to have fun exploring science, technology, engineering, and math.

Two years ago my school started a program called STEM Events to provide our students with opportunities to see how the concepts they study in separate classes like chemistry and geometry are really integrated in real-life situations.

The program highlights the connections among the various disciplines of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math-and sometimes we add the arts, for STEAM). It also encourages our students-all girls-to explore STEM-related concepts in a noncompetitive and fun way and to develop a passion for these concepts and disciplines. Women are underrepresented in the STEM fields, so this is particularly worthwhile for our school.

The STEM subjects are important because they provide a basic quantitative description of the world around us-they pervade every aspect of our lives. And the U.S. Department of Commerce has projected that employment in STEM occupations would increase by 8.9 percent from 2014 to 2024, while other occupations are expected to grow by 6.4 percent-and STEM degree holders have a higher average income than workers with other degrees, even when they work in non-STEM careers.

The more we expose our students to the STEM disciplines in both structured (classrooms, competitions, lectures) and unstructured (clubs, summer camps, after-school activities) environments, the more familiar they become with these concepts, activities, and challenges, which is what led us to create our program.

STEM Events: Informal and Fun

STEM Events is a series of informal gatherings held once a month at the end of the school day for 60 to 75 minutes. Each one is led by a small team of teachers who want to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of what we study in class and what we do in everyday life. These teachers aren't all teachers of STEM disciplines, although generally at least one of the teachers in each team is a STEM expert. We invite all faculty members to participate and share their interests and hobbies, as there is always a science or math connection.

One of our French teachers, for example, has a passion for origami, which inspired a STEM event called "The Math and Art of Origami." It introduced students to the idea that the ancient art of paper folding was not only alive and well but also very useful when applied to sciences like biology (heart stents) and astrophysics (space telescopes) because it inspires novel thinking in situations where something has to be packed small and then become bigger at the delivery point. There are also myriad connections between origami and math, some of which were explored in a session at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics conference in April in Washington, DC.

In other STEM events, students created binary bracelets (using this lesson plan for the main activity, which followed some unplugged computational thinking); built a snow village complete with LED lights; and programmed and 3D-printed cookie cutters and baked cookies with them.

Other popular events included "Patterns in Weaving," organized and led by an art teacher who had plenty of ideas and resources; "Math Gatherings," which involved going on a campus-wide math treasure hunt; and a friendly, low-stakes Sprouts tournament with our brother school. ( Sprouts is a strategy game created by two mathematicians at Cambridge University in the early 1960s.)

What has worked well for us: interesting, engaging pursuits that students don't naturally associate with the STEM fields, to emphasize the reach and diversity of such disciplines; hands-on, fun activities that catch the students' attention and bring home the importance of looking at a challenge from many perspectives in order to understand and appreciate it in depth; and informal, multilayered conversations that encourage making connections, looking for explanations, sharing ideas, collaborating, identifying and understanding the challenges, and problem solving together. This is not a time for worksheets.

"The girls loved being creative, exploring code, and making jewelry during this STEM activity!" is one of the many positive comments we've heard. The popularity of this program explains its endurance despite the pressure of an already jam-packed school day and overscheduled afternoons-I consider it a real victory since initiatives often die off after a few tries. Our students love spending time with their friends and doing something really different from what they do in school and outside of school.

The flexibility in terms of schedule and content of this program is one of its strengths. As its main goal is to spark and sustain curiosity about the STEM disciplines and there is no special curriculum to cover, our teams have been able to set their own schedule according to their own constraints. More importantly, each team can create its own content based on the passions of the teachers and the students. Plus, when many teachers participate, the ideas multiply and the workload decreases.

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A monthly after-school activity guides students to have fun exploring science, technology, engineering, and math.

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The Top 10 Education Podcasts for 2024  

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The Top 10 Education Podcasts for 2024  

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Here is a list of the top 10 podcast for teachers in 2024. Some of these podcasts will look familiar! I like to give you guys as much *updated* content as possible!

*Please submit 1 reflection per podcast / per episode. Please include the specific Podcast title in your reflection form (e.g. The Harvard EdCast Podcast - Episode: What it Takes to Change a School ).*

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Discover the top education podcasts popular right now. The guide below was put together by Horizon’s team of experts who found some of the most fun, informative and insightful educational podcasts out there today.

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4 Ways to Build a Culture of Professional Learning 

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4 Ways to Build a Culture of Professional Learning 

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4 Ways to Build a Culture of Professional Learning

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When school leaders encourage teachers to improve their craft through better professional development, the entire community benefits.

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Kickstarting Collaboration With a Lockbox Challenge 

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Kickstarting Collaboration With a Lockbox Challenge 

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"With the pandemic, kids have been staring at screens for a couple of years now," says Susan Bistransin, of Prince George's County Public Schools. "And they relish being able to get away from that. I think part of what they lost-not just learning loss during the pandemic-was socialization. Working in teams is something that doesn't come naturally to most kids anymore."

Bistransin and other teachers at Parkdale High School in Riverdale, Maryland, have found that high school students are more engaged in off-screen activities, particularly ones where kids get to work together. In Oscar Peña's financial literacy class, kids collaborate on a regular basis. Eleventh grader Iraima enjoys the fact that she gets to talk with other classmates and share opinions. "I've definitely built a lot of friendships throughout the class."

In this fun lesson, kids race against the clock to test their knowledge of what they've learned about online banking. Like escape rooms, this kind of activity is built around a story or scenario, and it works well for reviewing information at the end of a unit or before an assessment.

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Kickstarting Collaboration With a Lockbox Challenge

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When teens work together to solve puzzles, they practice much-needed social skills-and engage more deeply with the content.

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4 Ways to Make Classroom Participation More Inclusive 

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4 Ways to Make Classroom Participation More Inclusive 

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4 Ways to Make Classroom Participation More Inclusive

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When students feel seen and heard, engagement goes up. These simple strategies help teachers make classroom discussions more equitable for all.

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The Role of Coaching in Developing Playful Lessons 

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The Role of Coaching in Developing Playful Lessons 

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Many teachers want their classroom to be a place where learning is more joyful, but with the demands of content standards, time pressures, and classroom management, that can sometimes feel out of reach. In Denmark, some schools have solved this challenge by adopting an instructional coaching model: Educators trained in playful learning collaborate and consult with teachers regularly to help infuse socialization, activity, creativity, and meaning into their lessons. At Vorbasse School in Billund, when playful learning guide Maria Astrup Bendixen worked with math teacher Nicolaj Bech, they transformed a statistics lesson into a more connected and memorable experience for his middle school students.

To learn more about the research behind the practices seen in the video, check out the links below.

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The Role of Coaching in Developing Playful Lessons

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Giving teachers time to collaborate on making classroom activities more active, social, and meaningful can result in higher student engagement-and deeper understanding of academic content.

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7 Zones Every Middle School Classroom Should Have

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Setting up and organizing a classroom environment with more intention can help maximize the space for student engagement—and learning.

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Creating Opportunities for All Teachers to Grow 

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Creating Opportunities for All Teachers to Grow 

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At P.S. 249, in Brooklyn, New York, educators have leaned into an innovative professional development model called "lab sites" to help each other improve their teaching practice. Once a week, during PD time, teams of teachers get together to explore specific teaching strategies or activities they need help with. Teachers hone their skills by working with a small group of students who volunteer to stay after school, while their grade-level colleagues observe. Having students be part of the teachers' experience allows them real-time teaching and learning interactions, while the students get extra academic support. After the students leave, the group provides feedback to the teacher who was being observed on what went well and what still needs work. Teachers implement what they've learned in their classrooms later in the week and return the following week to let everyone know how it went.

The teachers at P.S. 249 were first introduced to lab sites in a Teachers College workshop about seven years ago, and they loved working with their peers and the students so much, they adapted it and made it part of their regular professional development. The low-stakes practice builds on the strengths of all teachers and gives new teachers, especially, an opportunity to grow and learn from their peers in a safe, supportive environment.

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Creating Opportunities for All Teachers to Grow

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When grade-level teams of teachers work together on skills and strategies to help them improve their practice every week, everyone benefits.

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3 Ways for Schools to Engage Families of Older Students 

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3 Ways for Schools to Engage Families of Older Students 

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From building more effective communication habits to creating a more welcoming back-to-school night to considering setting up a home visit system, there are many ways that secondary school administrators can work to improve family engagement, even as students get older. The best of these approaches will welcome caregivers of all backgrounds to partner with the school, increase community involvement, and ultimately boost student achievement.

To learn more about the benefits of the strategies covered in this video and others, explore these resources cited in the video:

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3 Ways for Schools to Engage Families of Older Students

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Though sustaining a strong connection between school and home can become more difficult in middle and high school, it's worth the extra effort to support long-term student success.

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Cross-grade buddy programs are well-regarded for building positive school culture. With the right planning, they can boost academic and social skills as well-for both older and younger students.

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Bringing Math and Physics to Life With a Model Car Derby 

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Bringing Math and Physics to Life With a Model Car Derby 

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Every year at Casco Bay High School in Portland, Maine, teachers stage a model car race as the culminating event for an integrated math and physics project that helps students connect to content in a hands-on way. Teams of students design, test, and tinker with several car designs before the big day in an attempt to build the fastest-and the slowest-model cars. And on race day, an atmosphere of competition and celebration builds excitement for their demonstrations of learning. Only one team wins, but everyone walks away with a better grasp on higher-level STEM concepts.

To learn more about the research behind the practices seen in the video, check out the links below.

The American Academy of Pediatrics' report on how play enhances development in young children (2018)

Kayleigh Skene, Christine M. O'Farrelly, Elizabeth M. Byrne, Natalie Kirby, Eloise C. Stevens, and Paul G. Ramchandani's meta-analysis and review on whether guidance during play can enhance children's learning and development in educational contexts (2022)

Rachel Parker, Bo Stjerne Thomsen, and Amy Berry's article on learning through play at school (2022)

Rosangela Bando, Emma Näslund-Hadley and Paul Gertler's study "Effect of Inquiry and Problem Based Pedagogy on Learning: Evidence from 10 Field Experiments in Four Countries" (2019)

Lu Zhang and Yan Ma's "A study on the impact of project-based learning on student learning effects: a meta-analysis study" (2023)

Cheng-Huan Chen and Yong-Cih Yang's study "Revisiting the effects of project-based learning on students' academic achievement: A meta-analysis investigating moderators" (2019)

Linda Darling-Hammond, Lisa Flook, Channa Cook-Harvey, Brigid Barron and David Osher's article "Implications for educational practice of the science of learning and development" (2019)

Helena M. Thuneberg, Hannu S. Salmi and Franz X. Bogner's research on the link between cognitive learning and hands-on inquiry in math (2018)

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Bringing Math and Physics to Life With a Model Car Derby

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Giving students a design challenge-and a compelling reason to delve into complex engineering-makes them more engaged, motivated, and committed to deepening their own understanding.

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Boosting Math Skills With Daily Practice 

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Boosting Math Skills With Daily Practice 

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Boosting Math Skills With Daily Practice

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Adding an extra period of math every day gives students an opportunity to review what they’ve learned and strengthen their mathematical thinking.

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3 Activities That Integrate SEL Into Elementary Math 

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3 Activities That Integrate SEL Into Elementary Math 

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Building social and emotional learning (SEL) into elementary math lessons not only is possible but can benefit students' emotional awareness as well as their mathematical thinking and skills. Plus, giving students meaningful opportunities to build empathy and connect their own emotions (and the feelings of those around them) with class content helps them relate to math concepts in new ways.

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3 Activities That Integrate SEL Into Elementary Math

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When social and emotional learning is woven into core math curriculum, elementary students can grow in their math skills, social awareness, and emotional literacy-all at the same time.

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In middle and high school, incorporating mood-boosting, brain-stimulating attention breaks into lessons can head off student inattention, boredom, and fatigue at the pass. To find many more brain breaks designed especially for older students, read Paige Tutt's article for Edutopia titled " 17 Brain Breaks Tailored for High Schoolers." To learn more about the neuroscience behind brain breaks, see Dr. Judy Willis's article " Using Brain Breaks to Restore Students' Focus" or Ethan R. Buch, Leonardo Claudino, Romain Quentin, Marlene Bönstrup, and Leonardo G. Cohen's 2021 research on how rest intervals strengthen the consolidation of skills.

To learn more about each of the breaks shown in the video, visit these sources:

Think Outside the Box activity from Tina Centineo, via X (formerly Twitter)

Jigsaw Jumble activity from "8 Easy, Awesome Brain Break Games for High School Students," by Jenn Breisacher, Student-Centered World

Sequence of Exercises and Calming Break from "54 Educational Brain Breaks Your Students Will Love," by Stephanie Sanders, We Are Teachers

Balloon Toss from AwesomelyTeacher, via X

Rock, Paper, Scissors Tournament from Barre Unified Union School District

Mysterious Image Game from Peter Embleton, via X

Tower of Terror Cup-Stacking Game from Jonathan Alsheimer, via X

Collaborative Class Story from Dora Hartsell, via X

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Students are still learning, even during brief breaks, which serve to help them decompress, refocus, and process new information.

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4 Ways to Help Teens Strengthen Social and Emotional Literacy 

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4 Ways to Help Teens Strengthen Social and Emotional Literacy 

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While much energy is invested in helping young children begin to identify and articulate their emotions, regulate themselves, and learn social skills, that focus tends to taper off as students get older. But social and emotional skills are just as critical in middle and high school, as students learn how to navigate more complex situations and relationships, confront higher expectations that bring more anxiety and stress, and grapple with bullying and social pressures. From gratitude journaling to mindfulness exercises, encouraging positive inner voice to connecting SEL to curriculum, these four strategies will make space for teens to keep building the lifelong skills that will help them throughout school and beyond.

To learn more about the research cited in the video, check out the links below.

Christina Cipriano, Michael J. Strambler, Lauren H. Naples, Cheyeon Ha, Megan Kirk, Miranda Wood, Kaveri Sehgal, Almut K. Zieher, Abigail Eveleigh, Michael McCarthy, Melissa Funaro, Annett Ponnock, Jason C. Chow, and Joseph Durlak's meta-analysis of evidence for social and emotional learning in universal school-based SEL interventions (2023)

Lan Nguyen Chaplin, Deborah Roedder John, Aric Rindfleisch, and Jeffrey J. Froh's studies on the impact of gratitude on adolescent materialism and generosity (2018)

Carolyn MacCann, Yixin Jiang, Luke E. R. Brown, Kit S. Double, Micaela Bucich, and Amirali Minbashian's meta-analysis on how emotional intelligence predicts academic performance (2020)

Sander Thomaes, Iris Charlotte Tjaarda, Eddie Brummelman, and Constantine Sedikides's research on how self-talk can benefit the mathematics performance of children with negative competence beliefs (2019)

Róisín M. Flanagan and Jennifer E. Symonds's literature review on children's self-talk in naturalistic classroom settings in middle childhood (2022)

Mary L. Phan, Tyler L. Renshaw, Julie Caramanico, Jeffrey M. Greeson, Elizabeth MacKenzie, Zabryna Atkinson-Diaz, Natalie Doppelt, Hungtzu Tai, David S. Mandell, and Heather J. Nuske's review of outcomes and evidence quality in research on mindfulness-based school interventions (2022)

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4 Ways to Help Teens Strengthen Social and Emotional Literacy

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When middle and high school students are given the chance to build social and emotional skills during the school day, they get better at self-regulation and grow more socially aware-both in and out of the classroom.

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Deepening Academic Understanding With Tangible Experiences 

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Deepening Academic Understanding With Tangible Experiences 

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Books offer the opportunity to step into someone else's world, and middle school ELA teacher Jennifer Montgomery's seventh-grade class did just that during their book study of Linda Sue Park's A Long Walk to Water. In a Socratic seminar, students discussed how the author builds empathy for the characters, whose lives are playing out during two different time periods in Sudan. But to bring the book's themes to life for her classroom in Eminence, Kentucky, Montgomery had her middle school students do their own walk-traveling a mile while carrying a jug filled with water. In the discussion that followed, students shared their own reflections and insights, emerging from this exploration with a stronger sense of empathy-and a solid experience of perspective-taking that will stick with them for years to come.

To learn more about the research behind the practices seen in the video, check out the links below.

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Deepening Academic Understanding With Tangible Experiences

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By providing middle school students a chance to walk in someone else's shoes, teachers can help them develop empathy-and a stronger connection to content.

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Building Problem-Solving Skills Through 'Speed Dating' 

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Building Problem-Solving Skills Through 'Speed Dating' 

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When English language arts teacher Cathleen Beachboard was trying to come up with new ways of encouraging her students at Fauquier High School in Warrenton, Virginia, to be solution-oriented, she noticed that while kids often get stuck on their own problems, they are quick to find solutions to other people's. Her husband jokingly said, "Wouldn't it be cool if you could just speed-date problems?" And the problem speed-dating activity was born. Beachboard has used this quick and simple strategy in her classes ever since.

"Today we were working on argumentative writing. But you could use this in any scenario, in any classroom, for any stuck point that the kids are having with any piece of content," she says.

In addition to hearing multiple ideas for solutions to their problems, kids get to know each other-and learn to see each other as experts in the room.

"Problem speed dating ultimately teaches them that as a society or as a person, you're not alone," Beachboard says. "And reaching out to others is important because that's where the magic happens. It happens when we use each other and we use the strength that every person has."

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Building Problem-Solving Skills Through 'Speed Dating'

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When students solve each other's problems, they gain confidence in their own skills and witness the power of collaboration in real time.

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To say that students are engaged in Nicole Goepper's French class at Fauquier High School in Warrenton, Virginia, is an understatement. Her lessons are peppered with games, songs, and even dancing, which keeps students on their toes. Her whiteboard relay strategy is especially captivating-and it can be used to assess any concept that can be assigned as a task that students complete by working together.

In Goepper's class, she most frequently uses it for verb conjugation. She calls out a verb, counts down from three, "and it's off to the races!" Each student on the team completes one subject-verb portion of the task and passes to their adjacent teammate, until all subjects are conjugated.

Says Goepper, "If somebody gets stuck, they've got their team to help them, but they're still the one that's actually writing it. Once the task goes all the way around and is completed, they stick the whiteboard on their head and say, "Fini!" And by sticking it on their head, the other teams can't see what they wrote. Also, when it's on their head, they can't change answers. No cheating in this fast-paced game!

Goepper awards points for each round: "First place, they get three points. Second place gets two points. And then if any team just has it correct, they get a point. If they did get it wrong initially, sorry, no points, but if they fix it and show me, OK, you get a point.They are encouraged to go back and fix mistakes."

At the end of all the rounds, the team with the most points gets paper euros, which they save up throughout the year and use for prizes.

The benefits of this strategy are hard to number. In addition to being a fun informal assessment, Goepper adds, "it's an easy prep for the teacher. It can be done impromptu. If you start seeing that something needs to be reviewed, it's easy to go into. Because they're in teams, there's that interaction because they want to win. And by having the pressure from your teammates wanting to win, you get a high level of achievement. It might be messy handwriting, but that's OK. "

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The team competition is fierce in this informal assessment activity, in which students have to work together to win.

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Exploring Writing, Social Studies, and Math in a Map Challenge

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Exploring Writing, Social Studies, and Math in a Map Challenge

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Each fifth grader in Andrea Ketcham's class in Eminence, Kentucky, has been charged with creating a world and asking someone else to navigate it. In this interdisciplinary project, students use a range of skills-from spatial awareness and mapmaking to communication skills and coding. To touch on English language arts standards, students use descriptive language to write about their imaginary land. Next, to align with social studies standards, they're tasked with drawing a map depicting it, complete with key features like grid points and a compass rose. When their maps are complete, the students come up with questions that challenge a classmate to identify characteristics of their land and program a Sphero BOLT robot to follow directions and get to a specific destination. By the end, students have mastered content from multiple subject areas-and stayed engaged and excited through the whole process.

To learn more about the research behind the practices seen in the video, check out the resources below.

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Exploring Writing, Social Studies, and Math in a Map Challenge

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Encouraging students to bring their creativity and imagination to challenging content makes it more accessible-and helps them learn it more deeply.

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Jump-Starting Academic Learning With Movement and Dance

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Jump-Starting Academic Learning With Movement and Dance

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French teacher Nicole Goepper is famous-for dancing with her students in the school courtyard. But even inside the walls of her northern Virginia classroom at Fauquier High School, kids are on their feet.

"I truly believe that there is something in our brains that connect words with movement," says Goepper, who references research showing how movement cements recall and boosts mood, helping to improve the well-being of students. Goepper saw this firsthand when she faced postpandemic declines in student mental health.

Goepper incorporates movement every chance she gets-from pairing new vocabulary with gestures, to acting out French accent marks, to the pièce de résistance: going outside to dance.

"Usually we dance in the middle of class. I use it as a reward for something we've done in class [kids get to pick which French pop songs they want to dance to], and I almost use it as a transition."

The benefits? "It's a brain break; it gets them moving, gets their hearts pumping, and that blood is going up into their brain. And it's like a primer, getting them ready to go [back inside to] learn more stuff."

But it's also a cultural connection, "which is a huge piece of learning and understanding of world language. When I introduce any new song to them, there's always, you know, who is singing it? Who is this person? A little backstory of the artist. And then just the general meaning of what's behind the song." Students learn about the song's relevance to French and French diaspora culture.

Finally, although it's a well-established fact that movement benefits younger students, Goepper believes it's just as beneficial for high school students. "There are kids who in the beginning don't want to put themselves out there," admits Goepper. "But then they realize that it's fun, and they feel left out if they're not joining in with us. I win over 99 percent of them."

Christian Andrä, Brian Mathias, Anika Schwager, Manuela Macedonia, and Katharina von Kriegstein's research on how learning foreign language vocabulary with gestures and pictures enhances memory for school children (2020)

Lawrence Shapiro and Steven Stolz's comprehensive review of studies on embodied cognition (2019)

Panagiotis Kosmas, Andri Ioannou, and Panayiotis Zaphiris's research on embodied learning and its effects on children's memory and language skills (2019)

Spyridoula Vazou, Panagiota Gavrilou, Evangelia Mamalaki, Anna Papanastasiou, and Nefeli Sioumala's study on the integration of physical activity and its influence on academic motivation (2012)

Christopher R. Madan and Anthony Singhal's article about using actions to enhance memory (2012)

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Jump-Starting Academic Learning With Movement and Dance

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The benefits of movement in the classroom aren't limited to younger students. Pairing new words and concepts with gestures or dance moves locks in understanding-and active brain breaks prime students to learn even more.

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Making Meaning of High School With Self-Reflection

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Making Meaning of High School With Self-Reflection

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In many high schools, only the top few highest-performing students get the chance to give a speech sharing a reflection on their school journey. But at Casco Bay High School, in Portland, Maine, every graduating senior experiences this opportunity. Through a series of introspective writing exercises, students craft a speech to deliver to an audience of classmates, family, and the greater school community that helps them make meaning of their four years of high school and look to the future with confidence. The result is a powerful, joyful event-and an established rite of passage that the school's younger students look forward to.

Says high school senior Kaya, "Now that it's done and I performed it, [I know] I wouldn't have been able to be successful without being pushed. It's the genuine care and love that the teachers have because they want you to succeed. They know your greatness and potential."

English language arts teacher Susan McCray, who supports and guides the students as they write their "final word" narratives, believes the experience is transformative for the students. "Every single kid is heard," she says. "And cherished, in that moment. Right? Loved, in that moment. Because that's what happens up there."

To learn more about the research behind the practices seen in the video, check out the links below.

Jerusha Conner, Michael Posner, and Bright Nsowaa's study on the relationship between student voice and student engagement in urban high schools (2022)

Kristina Zeiser, Carrie Scholz, and Victoria Cirks's report on how implementing and measuring student-centered learning practices can maximize student agency (2018)

Janneke van de Pol, Monique Volman, Frans Oort, and Jos Beishuizen's study on the effects of scaffolding in the classroom and its relation to student achievement, task effort, and appreciation of support (2015)

Cheryl J. Travers, Dominique Morisano, and Edwin A. Locke's qualitative study of self-reflection, growth goals, and academic outcomes (2014)

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Making Meaning of High School With Self-Reflection

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Building a tradition where high school seniors share a personal narrative has helped this school community honor each and every student experience.

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Boosting Student Belonging With the Jigsaw Technique

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Boosting Student Belonging With the Jigsaw Technique

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The "jigsaw classroom" is a cooperative learning approach originally designed by psychologist Elliot Aronson to build up empathy in recently desegregated classrooms. In the jigsaw system, each student receives one small part of a bigger lesson-then, in small groups, students have to pool their knowledge together and teach each other what they learned. "Aronson compared it to gift-giving," says social psychologist Geoffrey Cohen. "When I give a gift, I feel a sense of attachment to the person I'm giving it to-and vice versa."

Cohen walks us through the classic jigsaw research from the 1970s and lays out how the strategy can help the modern-day teacher looking to boost empathy, collaboration, and a sense of belonging in their classroom. To learn more from Daniel Leonard's interview with Cohen for Edutopia, read " The Science of Belonging and Connection."

To read the original research, along with several newer studies on the approach, check out the links below:

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Boosting Student Belonging With the Jigsaw Technique

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This classic group learning strategy can help students communicate, collaborate, and empathize with one another-fighting back against a growing sense of disconnection in schools.

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In Jennifer Montgomery's seventh-grade English class in Eminence, Kentucky, there are no students zoning out during class discussions. That's because she expects the students in the outer circle-the ones who are traditionally supposed to observe and actively listen to the students in the inner circle-to look for opportunities to jump in when they have something to add to the conversation. She reserves a single empty seat in the inner circle for these contributors, labeled "the hot seat," and it's made all the difference for bumping up participation in her Socratic seminars. "It propels the discussion," she says. "Sometimes it turns the discussion in a different direction. And it keeps them on their toes."

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Providing the active listeners in the outer ring of a Socratic circle a way to jump in with their burning questions and comments keeps all students engaged.

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Sustaining a Schoolwide Culture of Playful Learning

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Sustaining a Schoolwide Culture of Playful Learning

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In Eminence, Kentucky, a small rural district has dedicated their entire school to reveling in the joy and excitement of learning. From makerspaces to interactive hallways to a slide that sends students from the top level to the ground, they have created a space that captures the imagination-and has become the pride of their economically challenged community. But the approach goes well beyond the physical building. Teachers are supported in professional development sessions that encourage them to inject a sense of "surprise and delight" into their lessons, as well as in guiding students through meaningful projects that connect to their community. So school becomes a place where academic rigor is accomplished in an active, collaborative, and engaging way.

To learn more about the research behind the practices seen in the video, check out the links below.

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Sustaining a Schoolwide Culture of Playful Learning

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Educators in this small town prioritized innovation, creativity, and wonder in every aspect of their school, and the message to students was clear-dream big, because anything is possible.

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How to Welcome Newcomers in the Classroom

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How to Welcome Newcomers in the Classroom

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Making Physical Education More Well-Rounded

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Making Physical Education More Well-Rounded

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PE classes have come a long way, points out New Jersey wellness teacher Suzanne Horsley, whose job title reflects her district's dedication to making the class about more than just physical exercise. When she was in school, "we tended to the movement side of things, but we didn't necessarily attend to the emotional or the social."

Today, in Horsley's class, kids still get exposed to the standard fare of physical skills, but they also have ample opportunity to practice things like cooperation, team-building, perseverance, and kindness. All of her classes incorporate personal goal-setting, Socratic seminars, and time for personal and whole group reflection. One special feature is daily journal time, which supports goal-setting and self-awareness (not to mention writing practice). Even the youngest of students keep a journal-Horsley encourages her kindergarten students to draw their goals and accomplishments.

Horsley goes out of her way to create a space where all students feel comfortable trying out new physical skills. "Wellness is a class that we learn in front of each other," she says. "It's not like any other subject area. So if we don't set up a safe space for learning, we're not going to have everybody involved in the learning process."

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Making Physical Education More Well-Rounded

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Adding practices like reflective journaling, Socratic seminars, and team-building games to gym class is a perfect way for kids to learn and practice key SEL skills.

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Research shows that taking a more playful approach in the classroom could benefit students. But what does it mean to bring learning and play together, for students of all ages? For the Making Learning More Playful video series, we traveled to six schools in four countries to discover some of the characteristics of playful learning. Along the way, we saw a lot of great examples: students engaged in meaningful, hands-on projects; dancing and moving during active, energetic lessons; learning in the outdoors; collaborating to do great iterative work, driven by curiosity and passion; and even playful assessment. The common thread was clear-when more play is intentionally built into teaching and learning, students are enthusiastic and focused, agency and ownership soars, and the classroom environment is a joyful one.

To learn more about the research behind the practices seen in the video, check out the links below.

The American Academy of Pediatrics' report on how play enhances development in young children (2018)

Kayleigh Skene, Christine M. O'Farrelly, Elizabeth M. Byrne, Natalie Kirby, Eloise C. Stevens, and Paul G. Ramchandani's meta-analysis and review on whether guidance during play can enhance children's learning and development in educational contexts (2022)

Rachel Parker, Bo Stjerne Thomsen, and Amy Berry's article on learning through play at school (2022)

Jennifer M. Zosh, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Emily J. Hopkins, Hanne Jensen, Claire Liu, Dave Neale, S. Lynneth Solis, and David Whitebread's literature review on redefining play as a spectrum (2018)

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By bringing playful approaches into the classroom, teachers can engage more students at a deeper level, improve learning environments, and boost motivation.

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Please submit a reflection for each specific content link you engage with!

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Google Forms - create and analyze surveys, for free.

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Learn one teacher's strategies to return from break well-rested and recharged.

In my teaching experience, winter break arrives at the moment when both the students and I need it most. As we are nearing winter break, I look forward to some time to relax and renew my energy before school resumes in January. Some years I realized a day or two before the end of my time off that I wasn't any more rested than I had been in the days leading up to break. Over the years there are some things that I have found to help me have a truly revitalizing winter break.

Before break, I designate days on my calendar when I won't check email or do anything work-related. Allocating days when I won't engage in work helps me to be intentional about spending time with family as well as spending mindful time alone. Around a week before winter break, write down all work-related to-do items. Check off as many as possible before break. Listing what needs to get accomplished helps me stay organized. Even better, if I succeed in checking off all of the items, I return from the break with a clean slate.

A few days before break, plan a lesson for the first day back. Write out all ideas in detail and gather any materials needed to implement the lesson. Having a day planned for my return allows me to enjoy the break without worrying about the first day back.

The winter break can be a busy time filled with shopping, cooking, and chores, which means running the risk of arriving at the last day of break and realizing that I haven't taken any time for myself. To make sure the break isn't only full of responsibilities, I make a list of fun things I hope to do over break and then schedule them on a calendar. I include items such as outdoor activities, leisurely walking around a bookstore, taking exercise classes, baking, traveling, or watching a movie. Designating time for these activities means they are more likely to happen.

Nurture Relationships

Over the years, some of my best friends have started out as colleagues. I have found that having those supportive relationships at work helps reduce stress throughout the year. Over long breaks, I like to make plans with a colleague or group of colleagues to hang out and enjoy each other's company. We commit to not talking about work during that time together. Building relationships with colleagues outside of the work environment can reveal what is important to them other than their work.

During the school year, my schedule is often very busy, and I don't have a lot of time to connect with friends and extended family. The winter break is an opportunity to visit friends and family outside of school.

I read throughout the year, but it is typically work-related. During the break, I forgo reading young adult literature or nonfiction and instead find a relaxing book purely for pleasure. Over winter break, choose one "beach read" and take some time to read for fun. I also spend some time casually reading online for inspiration. I scroll Twitter and Instagram and read some of my favorite education bloggers for inspiration. This allows me to gather some new ideas for the second half of the year but doesn't feel like work.

Reflect and Set a Goal

Try at least one new technology tool with students before the end of the year.

Ask students to name some of their favorite books they have read this year, and choose a few to read myself.

Send at least one positive note home to each child's parent before the end of the school year.

Collaborate with colleagues in another subject to add interdisiplinary elements to a current assignment.

Incorporate new texts based on student interest and needs.

Find opportunities to make changes to assignments in order to provide more student choice.

Attend more events with students outside of school, such as sports, concerts, or plays.

I have never been much for New Year's resolutions, but I find that making one professional goal for the second half of the school year is inspiring without being stressful. When making a goal, I often begin by reviewing student feedback from first-semester student surveys. From these surveys, I may learn that students feel we need to spend more time on a certain aspect of the curriculum, students enjoy being read aloud to, or certain students feel distracted by the organization of the desk. I combine that feedback with ideas from the social media.

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Learn one teacher's strategies to return from break well-rested and recharged.

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Curiosity is a powerful tool that can be harnessed to guide middle school students to come up with solutions to real problems.

Inquiry-based learning provides students with the opportunity to explore real-world connections and problems through curious exploration and empowerment. Imagine sitting in a classroom as a seventh grader and being asked the question "How might we educate our community on their civic duty?"

Such a simple question, loaded with content to investigate, areas to explore, empathy to be considered, and agency to be born. But, how does this question create agency? Why does empathy need to be considered?

Student agency is when students become active agents in the process of learning and engage with the world with sustained, courageous curiosity.

With this in mind, it seems only natural that inquiry-based learning would lead to student agency. However, there's a trick to making sure that student agency is at the core of your designed inquiry-based learning prompt. That trick is empathy.

Ground Inquiry-Based Learning in Empathy

Empathy is found all around us. There's a reason we laugh when others laugh or smile when others smile. Emotions are contagious by design, but emotion is rooted in a cognitive idea. Whether it's the idea that we should be happy when friends succeed or that we should be energized to make a change that our community came together for, empathy can be a key factor in organized success. In turn, your inquiry-based learning question should be rooted in empathy.

Empathize with your students. Give them a voice in formulating their own question that is rooted in a topic or concept you're studying. You can also give students the task to empathize with other stakeholders to solve a problem they may see in their community. Through the use of empathy interviews, students can deduce a problem, team up cohesively to create a solution, and feel the empowerment of empathy in driving their learning.

Interviews CAN UNLOCK Empathy

In the question shared earlier, "How might we educate our community on their civic duty?" did you catch the "we" aspect of the question? The strategic wording creates a sense of collectivism that surrounds the problem students are being tasked with and allows for natural agency to occur. Furthermore, the question isn't designed for a simple solution but rather pushes a cognitive lift through exploration and creation. This question was given to seventh-grade students at my school.

Geared toward societal awareness in their social studies class, students were tasked with conducting a minimum of six empathy interviews with their guardians, school staff members, and other community members whom they encountered or had access to. The results of the empathy interviews were synthesized, and specific domains of interest were created to help categorize the learning outcomes. At this point, the facilitator (we prefer the language facilitator because it adds an additional layer of agency as the adult becomes the facilitator of student learning, rather than the teacher of content) drafted the question, starting with the stem "How might we..."

How might we educate our community on their civic duty?

How might we catalyze positive local and state perceptions of our community?

How might we promote healthy living through agricultural awareness and activity?

How might we promote equity and inclusion in our community?

The following are some sample inquiry-based questions from students' last empathy interviews:

Students then organically formed teams to tackle the question of their choosing. Some teams were made up of three students, other teams were four, and some teams were partnerships of two. Teams then chose their inquiry-based learning prompt and began the process of diving in and creating solutions. Questions may be used by more than one team, as the solutions may be vastly different than their peers', thus promoting additional agency in their product. Students then present to an authentic audience made up of their peers, stakeholders, and some of the same people with whom they conducted their empathy interviews.

This just adds another layer of authenticity to students' learning experience and creates agency and empowerment because they're able to share their findings with those who care the most about the issue.

Getting Good Questions Inspires Actionable Solutions

The questions drafted from the empathy interviews are designed to be more broad than confined, so that students have a wide area to explore without the confines of a singular, unactionable topic. When students conduct their empathy interviews, they are asked to home in on a specific aspect of their classroom studies and engage with their interviewees on that concept. Students are given the same parameters that the facilitator is given. These parameters state the following about the final question:

1. It has clear and direct real-world applications.

2. It is relevant to stakeholders' passions and interests.

3. It develops critical consciousness.

4. It promotes student agency and empowerment.

Naming, unpacking, and owning these tenets for a "How might we..." question with students creates for them a sense of ownership in their own learning by understanding the process, reason, and outcomes of their targeted solution-based design opportunity. Starting with a topic or concept with real-world application allows students to engage in inquiry that is aligned with established learning standards enhanced with relevancy.

Recognizing interests and passions through empathy allows students to develop the critical consciousness necessary to become global citizens. Agency and empowerment promotes the self-efficacy needed to be agents of change in an ever- evolving world.

After several years of this focus on inquiry-based learning (in classrooms and at a schoolwide level), our students have an increased sense of self. During our end-of-year reflection, when students highlight their biggest takeaways from their learning, they overwhelmingly highlight their excitement to express themselves creatively without repercussion and share their fulfillment in being heard, valued, and respected by their peers and teachers.

As evidenced through their continued passion around their own learning, assessment data, social and emotional learning data, and shared student dialogue, it's clear that they feel empowered to be agents of change, independent in their thoughts, collaborative in their discourse, and confident in their abilities to be problem solvers.

Ideas and inspiration for empathy-driven questions are everywhere, and it's important for teachers to keep an ear out for that inspiration in any given context. Keeping a continuous open dialogue with your students about their individual interests and passions is a great way to unearth ideas that could be great opportunities to have students become agents of their own learning.

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Using Inquiry-Based Learning to Encourage Student Agency

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Curiosity is a powerful tool that can be harnessed to guide middle school students to come up with solutions to real problems.

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Not all students feel comfortable participating verbally in class discussions, and these tools invite everyone to contribute.

Alexey Yaremenko / iStock

As teachers, we can ensure that "all means all" by introducing, modeling, and providing opportunities for students to use hand signals or gestures in the classroom. Gestures are a tool that can support equitable classroom participation by increasing engagement and allowing us to read the room to assess who understands a concept and tailor instruction accordingly.

When teachers ensure that all students are responding, we show that we value every student and have high expectations for every student to contribute. Gestures can prove helpful during independent, partner, small group, and whole group instruction. Below, I offer ways to implement them.

Using Gestures with Large Groups

When used in whole group situations, hand motions enable every student to respond at once. For example, "Show me with your face and body how the character was feeling at this point"or "Show me with your thumb how well you understood that strategy: thumbs up for 'I understand completely' and sideways for 'I'm getting there.'"

Using gestures is great for all and necessary for some, including quieter students, students with anxiety, multilingual students, and students who communicate without speaking. A student may be hesitant or unable to share with the whole group using words, and a hand motion allows them to express their thinking.

Assessment and Engagement

When I hold all students accountable for participating, energy and engagement increase. I can take a quick assessment of understanding. For example, "Show me with your fingers how many sounds you heard in that word." I reteach or scaffold as needed, either in the moment or during conferring or instruction at a later time.

Interactive read-alouds are an excellent time to use gestures. With younger kids, I have students act out the story with their hands, to retell it. Students can turn and talk briefly and use a variety of gestures depending on the question; for example, "Tell your partner the two different perspectives" might allow them to hold one hand flat, palm up for the first perspective and to raise the other hand for the second perspective.

Small Groups

When partners and small groups use gestures, they are more likely to bounce ideas off each other. For example, when using the American Sign Language (ASL) "agree" motion, one student can encourage their partner to continue and then build upon what their partner said, using the " I have something to add " gesture.

To assess partnerships and small group dialogues, I glance around the room to see which gestures are being used and get a quick idea of how the conversations are going; I can visit students who need coaching or a check in.

I have also seen students use hand motions when working independently to remind themselves to add detail (place one fist on top of the other), focus (hold two hands parallel with palms facing), or try a different strategy or word (start with palm flat then flip it over), showing how these moves become internalized and enhance learning.

Some of My Most-Used Hand Motions

Two of my favorite signals are . A sense of connection builds when classmates and/or the teacher agrees with a student. Teaching the disagreegesture and modeling how to respectfully disagree deepens conversations as we consider different perspectives.

When a listener uses the elaborate gesture, the speaker feels heard and is encouraged to say more or clarify. The speaker responds with more precise language, an important communication skill. By modeling and asking students to paraphrase, we teach one of the most important listening skills. In order to paraphrase, a listener needs to deeply listen and rephrase to summarize what has been said.

When teaching sound articulation, teachers ask students to point to where sounds are articulated to help students distinguish phonemes, for example: "say /th/ and point to your tongue between your teeth or feel the vibration in your throat. " One of my colleagues teaches or asks her kindergarten students to make a gesture for important high-frequency words; they love to show me their gestures as they warm up by reading the words.

When I introduce sentence stems, I emphasize certain words. For example, when using "I think this strategy is the best because ___," students use a flat hand extending out from their bodies with the word because. Recently, I saw a teacher use a connect signal with students to show how facts in nonfiction reading connect. As soon as she introduced it, students honed in on the instruction.

Supporting Classroom Culture

In addition to ensuring that all students have the tools to communicate and respond, we can use hand signals to keep instruction flowing. A student using the ASL signal for bathroom allows a teacher to know they are heading to the bathroom without having to stop instruction. Similarly, if a student needs to reset and reflect on classroom expectations, the teacher can give an inconspicuous letter R signal.

Start simple with gestures and introduce them with a sense of playfulness and a clear expectation that all will participate. Then, over time, go deeper and layer on complexity. Be responsive to what students need next. This will increase a sense of novelty and new learning. Using hand motions is such a powerful teaching move, a huge equity tool, and a way to increase engagement.

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Making Classroom Participation More Equitable With Hand Gestures

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Not all students feel comfortable participating verbally in class discussions, and these tools invite everyone to contribute.

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K-12 District Set Out to Learn How Our Teachers Were Using Tech

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K-12 District Set Out to Learn How Our Teachers Were Using Tech

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Technology Solutions That Drive Education

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So, when a 2022 JAMA Pediatrics study found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, screen time among children ages 3 to 18 went up 59 percent globally, our district took notice. We also considered a 2019 longitudinal study of Australian children reported in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. The study notes that among the following categories of screen time - social, educational, passive, interactive and other - educational screen time provided the most benefit.

Curious as to how much screen time students across our district were experiencing and how they were using technology to learn, our district leaders decided to take a closer look. To get a sense of what was happening in the classroom, our instructional team facilitated a series of "learning walks." What we discovered was eye-opening.

RELATED: Check out the research on screen time and school-aged kids.

We Designed a Student-Centered Tool to Observe Ed Tech Use

We started the process by creating a student-centered observation tool to help us reflect during the walks. The tool implemented the four C's of 21st century learning: creativity, communication, collaboration and critical thinking. It also included Ruben Puentedura's SAMR ( substitution, augmentation, modification and redefinition) model of technology integration, and some popular blended-learning models such as station rotation, whole-group rotation, flipped classroom and playlist. In addition, we paid close attention to the program or tool that teachers and students used with particular technologies.

We then traveled to all 16 of our campuses (10 elementary schools, three middle schools and three high schools) to see blended learning in action. For each school, we formed teams of six to 10 people, which included district- and school-level staff. We spent an hour observing up to six classrooms, followed by a half hour to debrief.
DIG DEEPER: Learn how technology supports personalized learning in K-12.
The Truth About Higher Student Engagement

After completing all 16 learning walks, district and school leadership gathered at a monthly meeting where they identified similarities and differences among their observations as well as any valuable takeaways.

We found higher levels of student engagement when teachers used gamification tools; when teachers provided student voice and choice to display student mastery; and when they prioritized communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking.

Some school leaders noticed large amounts of substitution and augmentation in student learning experiences. There was more evidence of students using technology for communication and collaboration rather than for critical thinking or creativity. There were also some instances where the technology use could have been more purposeful and engaging instead of serving as a babysitter.
DISCOVER: Here's how technology enables collaboration on K-12 projects.
So, our group equipped each principal with a lesson plan containing an appropriate topic and lesson structure requiring them to choose how they would integrate technology using the models upon which we based the rubric. They then shared their creations with small groups of their peers, asking further questions and navigating the ensuing discussion.

Targeted Professional Development Is Key to Ed Tech Integration

While the learning walk process was not perfect, I think it showed our district and school-level administrators the importance of meaningful, engaging technology integration within the classrooms. It also revealed the importance of planning for technology integration by identifying the tools, the structure for integration and the purpose behind the technology use.

Each school came to its own conclusions on how next to proceed. Some decided to conduct more learning walks for teachers to learn from each other, and others promoted teacher-led professional development. On the district level, we provided targeted technology-focused PD for teachers, which focused on tech integration, equipping teachers with ideas about what could be and not mandating any one approach.

So far, we've received positive feedback on the introduction of new tools, the reiteration of what integration could look like and reminders on student ownership in the process.

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What Happened When Our K-12 District Set Out to Learn How Our Teachers Were Using Tech

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After comparing what we saw in the classroom to 21st century ed tech best practices, we found room for improvement.

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Technology Solutions That Drive Education

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Now that many students have devices and access to technology, educators and school leaders must work to narrow the digital divide through equity of use. If students aren't exposed to technology and taught how to use it, they will fall behind their peers.

"Educators should make sure logging in is a really easy, smooth process," Highfill says. "Once I get everyone logged in, the No. 1 thing I have to get students to learn how to do is share their screen."

This not only helps her work through problems with students, she says, but also helps students take a more active role in their learning. Students will find new ways to achieve a goal or manipulate a technology and can show the class - and the teacher - how they've accomplished it by sharing their screen. "You empower them and put them in the teaching role," Highfill adds.

What Are the Benefits of Technology for Students?

Through technology, schools can support all students. There are roughly 60 grade school students and nearly 250 high school students enrolled at Pleasanton Virtual Academy. "I'm so excited our district put in that investment," Highfill says. "We're a public school virtual academy. They invested in a quality virtual academy to meet the needs of all students."

Even students who are learning in an in-person environment are using technology in their daily lives. Integrating it into the classroom gives them an opportunity to learn to use tech in a meaningful way.
Build the themes of digital citizenship into instruction and business planning.
"If you have the skills and know how to research and find information and discern whether that information is true or not, that's going to help you not only in school with your schoolwork, but also with life in general," Lim says.

"I watch the kids, and they're very addicted to their devices," says Highfill. "So, it's my new teaching point: How can you take a digital diet, and how can you identify when tech is not doing good things for you?"

Highfill says that anytime there's a fear about introducing technology to the classroom, educators should use that. "We have to teach students how to take care of themselves if they're going to use technology," she says.

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Technology in the Classroom & The Benefits for K-12 Schools

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Adoption & introduction of educational technology in the classroom is good for both students & educators. Learn how it works, why it's important & the benefits.

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Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom

There is a widespread notion that educational systems should empower learners with skills and competences to cope with a constantly changing landscape. Reference is often made to skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, collaborative skills, innovation, digital literacy, and adaptability. What is negotiable is how best to achieve the development of those skills, in particular which teaching and learning approaches are suitable for facilitating or enabling complex skills development. In this paper, we build on our previous work of exploring new forms of pedagogy for an interactive world, as documented in our Innovating Pedagogy report series. We present a set of innovative pedagogical approaches that have the potential to guide teaching and transform learning. An integrated framework has been developed to select pedagogies for inclusion in this paper, consisting of the following five dimensions: (a) relevance to effective educational theories, (b) research evidence about the effectiveness of the proposed pedagogies, (c) relation to the development of twenty-first century skills, (d) innovative aspects of pedagogy, and (e) level of adoption in educational practice. The selected pedagogies, namely formative analytics, teachback, place-based learning, learning with drones, learning with robots, and citizen inquiry are either attached to specific technological developments, or they have emerged due to an advanced understanding of the science of learning. Each one is presented in terms of the five dimensions of the framework.

Introduction

In its vision for the future of education in 2030, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development ( OECD, 2018) views essential learner qualities as the acquisition of skills to embrace complex challenges and the development of the person as a whole, valuing common prosperity, sustainability and wellbeing. Wellbeing is perceived as "inclusive growth" related to equitable access to " quality of life, including health, civic engagement, social connections, education, security, life satisfaction and the environment" (p. 4). To achieve this vision, a varied set of skills and competences is needed, that would allow learners to act as "change agents" who can achieve positive impact on their surroundings by developing empathy and anticipating the consequences of their actions.

Several frameworks have been produced over the years detailing specific skills and competences for the citizens of the future (e.g., Trilling and Fadel, 2009; OECD, 2015, 2018; Council of the European Union, 2018). These frameworks refer to skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, team work, communication and negotiation skills; and competences related to literacy, multilingualism, STEM, digital, personal, social, and "learning to learn" competences, citizenship, entrepreneurship, and cultural awareness ( Trilling and Fadel, 2009; Council of the European Union, 2018). In a similar line of thinking, in the OECD Learning Framework 2030 ( OECD, 2018) cognitive, health and socio-emotional foundations are stressed, including literacy, numeracy, digital literacy and data numeracy, physical and mental health, morals, and ethics.

The question we are asked to answer is whether the education vision of the future, or the development of the skills needed to cope with an ever-changing society, has been met, or can be met. The short answer is not yet. For example, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) has been ranking educational systems based on 15-year-old students' performance on tests about reading, mathematics and science every 3 years in more than 90 countries. In the latest published report ( OECD, 2015), Japan, Estonia, Finland, and Canada are the four highest performing OECD countries in science. This means that students from these countries on average can " creatively and autonomously apply their knowledge and skills to a wide variety of situations, including unfamiliar ones" ( OECD, 2016a, p.2). Yet about 20% of students across participating countries are shown to perform below the baseline in science and proficiency in reading ( OECD, 2016b). Those most at risk are socio-economically disadvantaged students, who are almost three times more likely than their peers not to meet the given baselines. These outcomes are quite alarming; they stress the need for evidence-based, effective, and innovative teaching and learning approaches that can result in not only improved learning outcomes but also greater student wellbeing. Overall, an increasing focus on memorization and testing has been observed in education, including early years, that leaves no space for active exploration and playful learning ( Mitchell, 2018), and threatens the wellbeing and socioemotional growth of learners. There is an increased evidence-base that shows that although teachers would like to implement more active, innovative forms of education to meet the diverse learning needs of their students, due to a myriad of constraints teachers often resort to more traditional, conservative approaches to teaching and learning ( Ebert-May et al., 2011; Herodotou et al., 2019).

In this paper, we propose that the distance between educational vision and current teaching practice can be bridged through the adoption and use of appropriate pedagogy that has been tested and proven to contribute to the development of the person as a whole. Evidence of impact becomes a central component of the teaching practice; what works and for whom in terms of learning and development can provide guidelines to teaching practitioners as to how to modify or update their teaching in order to achieve desirable learning outcomes. Educational institutions may have already adopted innovations in educational technology equipment (such as mobile devices), yet this change has not necessarily been accompanied by respective changes in the practice of teaching and learning. Enduring transformations can be brought about through "pedagogy," that is improvements in "the theory and practice of teaching, learning, and assessment" and not the mere introduction of technology in classrooms ( Sharples, 2019). PISA analysis of the impact of Information Communication Technology (ICT) on reading, mathematics, and science in countries heavily invested in educational technology showed mixed effects and "no appreciable improvements" ( OECD, 2015, p.3).

The aim of this study is to review and present a set of innovative, evidence-based pedagogical approaches that have the potential to guide teaching practitioners and transform learning processes and outcomes. The selected pedagogies draw from the successful Innovating Pedagogy report series ( https://iet.open.ac.uk/innovating-pedagogy), produced by The Open University UK (OU) in collaboration with other centers of research in teaching and learning, that explore innovative forms of teaching, learning and assessment. Since 2012, the OU has produced seven Innovating Pedagogy reports with SRI international (USA), National Institute of Education (Singapore), Learning In a NetworKed Society (Israel), and the Center for the Science of Learning & Technology (Norway). For each report, teams of researchers shared ideas, proposed innovations, read research papers and blogs, and commented on each other's draft contributions in an organic manner ( Sharples et al., 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016; Ferguson et al., 2017, 2019). Starting from an initial list of potential promising educational innovations that may already be in currency but not yet reached a critical mass of influence on education, these lists were critically and collaboratively examined, and reduced to 9-11 main topics identified as having the potential to provoke major shifts in educational practice.

After seven years of gathering a total of 70 innovative pedagogies, in this paper seven academics from the OU, authors of the various Innovating Pedagogy reports, critically reflected on which of these approaches have the strongest evidence and/or potential to transform learning processes and outcomes to meet the future educational skills and competences described by OECD and others. Based upon five criteria and extensive discussions, we selected six approaches that we believe have the most evidence and/or potential for future education:

* Formative analytics,

* Teachback,

* Place-based learning,

* Learning with robots,

* Learning with drones,

* Citizen inquiry.

Formative analytics is defined as "supporting the learner to reflect on what is learned, what can be improved, which goals can be achieved, and how to move forward" ( Sharples et al., 2016, p.32). Teachback is a means for two or more people to demonstrate that they are progressing toward a shared understanding of a complex topic. Place-based learning derives learning opportunities from local community settings, which help students connect abstract concepts from the classroom and textbooks with practical challenges encountered in their own localities. Learning with robots could help teachers to free up time on simple, repetitive tasks, and provide scaffolding to learners. Learning with drones is being used to support fieldwork by enhancing students' capability to explore outdoor physical environments. Finally, citizen inquiry describes ways that members of the public can learn by initiating or joining shared inquiry-led scientific investigations.

Devising a Framework for Selection: The Role of Evidence

* Relevance to effective educational theories: the first criterion refers to whether the proposed pedagogy relates to specific educational theories that have shown to be effective in terms of improving learning.

* Research evidence about the effectiveness of the proposed pedagogies: the second criterion refers to actual studies testing the proposed pedagogy and their outcomes.

* Relation to the development of twenty-first century skills: the third criterion refers to whether the pedagogy can contribute to the development of the twenty-first century skills or the education vision of 2030 (as described in the introduction section).

* Innovative aspects of pedagogy: the fourth criterion details what is innovative or new in relation to the proposed pedagogy.

* Level of adoption in educational practice: the last criterion brings in evidence about the current level of adoption in education, in an effort to identify gaps in our knowledge and propose future directions of research.

A major component of the proposed framework is effectiveness, or the generation of evidence of impact. The definition of what constitutes evidence varies ( Ferguson and Clow, 2017; Batty et al., 2019), and this often relates to the quality or strength of evidence presented. The Strength of Evidence pyramid by John and McNeal (2017) (see Figure 1) categorizes different types of evidence based on their strength, ranging from expert opinions as the least strong type of evidence to meta-analysis or synthesis as the strongest or most reliable form of evidence. While the bottom of the pyramid refers to "practitioners' wisdom about teaching and learning," the next two levels refer to peer-reviewed and published primary sources of evidence, both qualitative and quantitative. They are mostly case-studies, based on either the example of a single institution, or a cross-institutional analysis involving multiple courses or institutions. The top two levels involve careful consideration of existing resources of evidence and inclusion in a synthesis or meta-analysis. For example, variations of this pyramid in medical studies present Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) at the second top level of the pyramid, indicating the value of this approach for gaining less biased quality evidence.

Another approach proposed by the innovation foundation Nesta presents evidence on a scale of 1 to 5, showcasing the level of confidence with the impact of an intervention ( Puttick and Ludlow, 2012). Level 1 studies describe logically, coherently and convincingly what has been done and why it matters, while level 5 studies produce manuals ensuring consistent replication of a study. The evidence becomes stronger when studies prove causality (e.g., through experimental approaches) and can be replicated successfully. While these frameworks are useful for assessing the quality or strength of evidence, they do not make any reference to how the purpose of a study can define which type of evidence to collect. Different types of evidence could effectively address different purposes; depending on the objective of a given study a different type of evidence could be used ( Batty et al., 2019). For example, the UK government-funded research work by the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) is using RCTs, instead of for example expert opinions, as the purpose of their studies is to capture the impact of certain interventions nationally across schools in the UK.

Education, as opposed to other disciplines such as medicine and agriculture, has been less concerned with evaluating different pedagogical approaches and determining their impact on learning outcomes. The argument often made is the difficulty in evaluating learning processes, especially through experimental methodologies, due to variability in teaching conditions across classrooms and between different practitioners, that may inhibit any comparisons and valid conclusions. In particular, RCTs have been sparse and often criticized as not explaining any impact (or absence of impact) on learning, a limitation that could be overcome by combining RCT outcomes with qualitative methodologies ( Herodotou et al., 2017a). Mixed-methods evaluations could identify how faithfully an intervention is applied to different learning contexts or for example, the degree to which teachers have been engaged with it. An alternative approach is Design-Based Research (DBR); this is a form of action-based research where a problem in the educational process is identified, solutions informed by existing literature are proposed, and iterative cycles of testing and refinement take place in order to identify what works in practice in order to improve the solution. DBR often results in guidelines or theory development (e.g., Anderson and Shattuck, 2012).

An evidence-based mindset in education has been recently popularized through the EEF. Their development of the teaching and learning toolkit provides an overview of existing evidence about certain approaches to improving teaching and learning, summarized in terms of impact on attainment, cost and the supporting strength of evidence. Amongst the most effective teaching approaches are the provision of feedback, development of metacognition and self-regulation, homework for secondary students, and mastery learning ( https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk). Similarly, the National Center for Education and Evaluation (NCEE) in the US conducts large-scale evaluations of education programs with funds from the government. Amongst the interventions with the highest effectiveness ratings are phonological awareness training, reading recovery, and dialogic reading ( https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/).

The importance of evidence generation is also evident in the explicit focus of Higher Education institutions in understanding and increasing educational effectiveness as a means to: tackle inequalities and promote educational justice (see Durham University Evidence Center for Education; DECE), provide high quality education for independent and lifelong learners (Learning and Teaching strategy, Imperial College London), develop criticality and deepen learning (London Center for Leadership in Learning, UCL Institute of Education), and improve student retention and performance in online and distance settings [Institute of Educational Technology (IET) OU].

The generation of evidence can help identify or debunk possible myths in education and distinguish between practitioners' beliefs about what works in their practice as opposed to research evidence emerging from systematically assessing a specific teaching approach. A characteristic example is the "Learning Styles" myth and the assumption that teachers should identify and accommodate each learner's special way of learning such as visual, auditory and kinesthetic. While there is no consistent evidence that considering learning styles can improve learning outcomes (e.g., Rohrer and Pashler, 2010; Kirschner and van Merriënboer, 2013; Newton and Miah, 2017), many teachers believe in learning styles and make efforts in organizing their teaching around them ( Newton and Miah, 2017). In the same study, one third of participants stated that they would continue to use learning styles in their practice despite being presented with negative evidence. This suggests that we are rather in the early days of transforming the practice of education and in particular, developing a shared evidence-based mindset across researchers and practitioners.

In order to critically review the 70 innovative pedagogies from the seven Innovating Pedagogy reports, over a period of 2 months the seven authors critically evaluated academic and gray literature that was published after the respective reports were launched. In line with the five criteria defined above, each author contributed in a dynamic Google sheet what evidence was available for promising approaches. Based upon the initial list of 70, a short-list of 10 approaches was pre-selected. These were further fine-tuned to the final six approaches identified for this study based upon the emerging evidence of impact available as well as potential opportunity for future educational innovation. The emerging evidence and impact of the six approaches were peer-reviewed by the authoring team after contributions had been anonymized, and the lead author assigned the final categorizations.

In the next section, we present each of the proposed pedagogies in relation to how they meet the framework criteria, in an effort to understand what we know about their effectiveness, what evidence exist showcasing impact on learning, how each pedagogy accommodates the vision of the twenty-first century skills development, innovation aspects and current levels of adoption in educational practice.

Selected Pedagogies

Formative Analytics

Relevance to Effective Educational Theories

As indicated by the Innovating Pedagogy 2016 report ( Sharples et al., 2016, p.32), "formative analytics are focused on supporting the learner to reflect on what is learned, what can be improved, which goals can be achieved, and how to move forward." In contrast to most analytics approaches that focus on analytics of learning, formative analytics aims to support analytics for learning, for a learner to reach his or her goals through "smart" analytics, such as visualizations of potential learning paths or personalized feedback. For example, these formative analytics might help learners to effectively self-regulate their learning. Zimmerman (2000) defined self-regulation as "self-generated thoughts, feelings and actions that are planned and cyclically adapted to the attainment of personal learning goals." Students have a range of choices and options when they are learning in blended or online environments as to when, what, how, and with whom to study, with minimal guidance from teachers. Therefore, "appropriate" Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) strategies are needed for achieving individual learning goals ( Hadwin et al., 2011; Trevors et al., 2016).

With the arrival of fine-grained log-data and the emergence of learning analytics there are potentially more, and perhaps new, opportunities to map how to support students with different SRL ( Winne, 2017). With trace data on students' affect (e.g., emotional expression in text, self-reported dispositions), behavior (e.g., engagement, time on task, clicks), and cognition (e.g., how to work through a task, mastery of task, problem-solving techniques), researchers and teachers are able to potentially test and critically examine pedagogical theories like SRL theories on a micro as well as macro-level ( Panadero et al., 2016; D'Mello et al., 2017).

Research Evidence About the Effectiveness of the Proposed Pedagogies

There is an emergence of literature that uses formative analytics to support SRL and to understand how students are setting goals and solve computer-based tasks ( Azevedo et al., 2013; Winne, 2017). For example, using the software tool nStudy ( Winne, 2017) recently showed that trace data from students in forms of notes, bookmarks, or quotes can be used to understand the cycles of self-regulation. In a study of 285 students learning French in a business context, using log-file data ( Gelan et al., 2018) found that engaged and self-regulated students outperformed students who were "behind" in their study. In an introductory mathematics course amongst 922 students, Tempelaar et al. (2015) showed that a combination of self-reported learning dispositions from students in conjunction with log-data of actual engagement in mathematics tasks provide effective formative analytics feedback to students. Recently, Fincham et al. (2018) found that formative analytics could actively encourage 1,138 engineering learners to critically reflect upon one of their eight adopted learning strategies, and where needed adjust it.

Relation to the Development of Twenty-First Century Skills

Innovative Aspects of Pedagogy

By using fine-grained data and reporting this directly back to students in the form of feedback or dashboards, the educational practice is substantially influenced, and subsequently innovated. In particular, instead of waiting for feedback from a teacher at the end of an assessment task, students can receive formative analytics on demand (when they want to), or ask for the formative analytics that link to their own self-regulation strategies. This is a radical departure from more traditional pedagogies that either place the teacher at the center, or expect students to be fully responsible for their SRL.

Level of Adoption in Educational Practice

Teachback

Relevance to Effective Educational Theories

The method of Teachback, and the name, were originally devised by the educational technologist Gordon Pask (1976), as a means for two or more people to demonstrate that they are progressing toward a shared understanding of a complex topic. It starts with an expert, teacher, or more knowledgeable student explaining their knowledge of a topic to another person who has less understanding. Next, the less knowledgeable student attempts to teach back what they have learned to the more knowledgeable person. If that is successful, the one with more knowledge might then explain the topic in more detail. If the less knowledgeable person has difficulty in teaching back, the person with more expertise tries to explain in a clearer or different way. The less knowledgeable person teaches it again until they both agree.

A classroom teachback session could consist of pairs of students taking turns to teach back to each other a series of topics set by the teacher. For example, a science class might be learning the topic of "eclipses." The teacher splits the class into pairs and asks one student in each pair to explain to the other what they know about "eclipse of the sun." Next, the class receives instruction about eclipses from the teacher, or a video explanation. Then, the second student in the pair teaches back what they have just learned. The first student asks questions to clarify such as, "What do you mean by that?" If either student is unsure, or the two disagree, then they can ask the teacher. The students may also jointly write a short explanation, or draw a diagram of the eclipse, to explain what they have learned.

The method is based on the educational theory of "radical constructivism" (e.g., von Glaserfeld, 1987) which sees knowledge as an adaptive process, allowing people to cope in the world of experience by building consensus through mutually understood language. It is a cybernetic theory, not a cognitive one, in which structured conversation and feedback among individuals create a system that "comes to know" by creating areas of mutual understanding.

Research Evidence About the Effectiveness of the Proposed Pedagogies

Some doctors and healthcare professionals have adopted teachback in their conversations with patients to make sure they understand instructions on how to take medication and manage their care. In a study by Negarandeh et al. (2013) with 43 diabetic patients, a nurse conducted one 20-min teachback session for each patient, each week over 3 weeks. A control group ( N = 40) spent similar times with the nurse, but received standard consultations. The nurse asked questions such as "When you get home, your partner will ask you what the nurse said. What will you tell them?" Six weeks after the last session, those patients who learned through teachback knew significantly more about how to care for their diabetes than the control group patients. Indeed, a systematic review study of 12 published articles covering teachback for patients showed positive outcomes on a variety of measures, though not all were statistically significant ( Ha Dinh et al., 2016).

Relation to the Development of Twenty-First Century Skills

Teachback has strong relevance in a world of social and conversational media, with "fake news" competing for attention alongside verified facts and robust knowledge. How can a student "come to know" a new topic, especially one that is controversial. Teachback can be a means to develop the skills of questioning knowledge, seeking understanding, and striving for agreement.

Innovative Aspects of Pedagogy

The conversational partner in Teachback could be an online tutor or fellow student, or an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system that provides a "teachable agent". With a teachable agent, the student attempts to teach a recently-learned topic to the computer and can see a dynamic map of the concepts that the computer agent has "learned" ( www.teachableagents.org/). The computer could then attempt to teachback the knowledge. Alternatively, AI techniques can enhance human teachback by offering support and resources for a productive conversation, for example to search for information or clarify the meaning of a term.

Rudman (2002) demonstrated a computer-based variation on teachback. In this study, one person learned the topic of herbal remedies from a book and became the teacher. A second person then attempted to learn about the same topic by holding a phone conversation with the more-knowledgeable teacher. The phone conversation between the two people was continually monitored by an AI program that detected keywords in the spoken dialogue. Whenever the AI program recognized a keyword or phrase in the conversation (such as the name of a medicinal herb, or its properties), it displayed useful information on the screen of the learner, but not the teacher. Giving helpful feedback to the learner balanced the conversation, so that both could hold a more constructive discussion.

Level of Adoption in Educational Practice

The method has seen some adoption into medical practice ( https://bit.ly/2Xr9qY5). It has also been tested at small scale for science education ( Gutierrez, 2003). Reciprocal teaching has been adopted in some schools for teaching of reading comprehension ( Oczuks, 2003).

Placed-Based Learning

Place-based learning derives learning opportunities from local community settings. These help students to connect abstract concepts from the classroom and textbooks with practical challenges encountered in their own localities. "Place" can refer to learning about physical localities, but also the social and cultural layers embedded within neighborhoods; and engaging with communities and environments as well as observing them. It can be applied as much to arts and humanities focused learning as science-based learning. Place-based learning can encompass service learning, where students, and teachers solve local community problems, and through place-based learning acquire and learn a range of skills ( Sobel, 2004). Mobile and networked technologies have opened up new possibilities for constructing and sharing knowledge, and reaching out to different stakeholders. Learning can take place while mobile, enabling communication across students and teachers, and beyond the field site. The physical and social aspects of the environment can be enhanced or augmented by digital layers to enable a richer experience, and greater access to resources and expertise.

Relevance to Effective Educational Theories

Place-based learning draws upon experiential models of learning (e.g., Kolb, 1984), where active engagement with a situation and resulting experiences are reflected upon to help conceptualize learning, which in turn may trigger further explorations or experimentation. It may be structured as problem-based learning. Unplanned or unintentional learning outcomes may occur as a result of engagements, so place-based learning also draws on incidental learning (e.g., Kerka, 2000). Place-based learning declares that a more "authentic" and meaningful learning experience can happen in relevant environments, aligning with situated cognition, that states that knowledge is situated within physical, social and cultural contexts ( Brown et al., 1989). Learning episodes are often encountered with and through other people, a form of socio-cultural learning (e.g., Vygotsky, 1978). Networked technologies can enhance what experiences may be possible, and through the connections that might be made, recently articulated as connectivism (e.g., Siemens, 2005; Ito et al., 2013).

Research Evidence About the Effectiveness of the Proposed Pedagogies

Place-based learning draws on a range of pedagogies, and in part derives its authority from research into their efficacy (e.g., experiential learning, situated learning, problem-based learning). For example, in a study of 400 US high school students Ernst and Monroe (2004) found that environment-based teaching both significantly improved students' critical thinking skills, and also their disposition toward critical thinking. Research has shown that learning is very effective if carried out in "contexts familiar to students' everyday lives" ( Bretz, 2001, p.1112). In another study, Linnemanstons and Jordan (2017) found that educators perceived students to display greater engagement and understanding of concepts when learning through experiential approaches in a specific place. Semken and Freeman (2008) trialed a method to test whether "sense of place" could be measured as learning outcome when students are taught through place-based science activities. Using a set of psychometric surveys tested on a cohort of 31 students, they "observed significant gains in student place attachment and place meaning" (p.1042). In an analysis of 23 studies exploring indigenous education in Canada, Madden (2015) showed that place-based education can play an effective role in decolonizing curriculum, fostering understandings of shared histories between indigenous and non-indigenous learners in Canada. Context-aware systems that are triggered by place can provide location relevant learning resources ( Kukulska-Hulme et al., 2015), enhancing the ecology of tools available for place-based learning. However, prompts to action from digital devices might also be seen as culturally inappropriate in informal, community based learning where educational activities and their deployment needs to be considered with sensitivity ( Gaved and Peasgood, 2017).

Relation to the Development of Twenty-First Century Skills

Critical thinking and problem solving are central to this experiential-based approach to learning. Contextually based, place-based learning requires creativity and innovation by participants to manage and respond to often unexpected circumstances with unexpected learning opportunities and outcomes likely to arise. As an often social form of learning, communication and collaboration are key skills developed, with a need to show sensitivity to local circumstances. An ability to learn the skills to manage social and cross-cultural interactivity will be central for a range of subject areas taught through place-based learning, such as language learning or human geography. Increasingly, place-based learning is enhanced or augmented by mobile and networked technologies, so digital literacy skills need to be acquired to take full advantage of the tools now available.

Innovative Aspects of Pedagogy

Place-based learning re-associates learning with local contexts, at a time when educators are under pressure to fit into national curricula and a globalized world. It seeks to re-establish students with a sense of place, and recognize the opportunities of learning in and from local community settings, using neighborhoods as the specific context for experiential and problem-based learning. It can provide a mechanism for decolonializing curriculum, recognizing that specific spaces can be understood to have different meanings to different groups of people, and allowing diverse voices to be represented. Digital and networked technologies extend the potential for group and individual learning, reaching out and sharing knowledge with a wider range of stakeholders, enabling flexibility in learning, and a greater scale of interactions. Networked tools enable access to global resources, and learning beyond the internet, with smartphones and tablets (increasingly owned by the learners themselves) as well as other digital tools linked together for gathering, analyzing and reflection on data and interactions. Context and location aware technologies can trigger learning resources on personal devices, and augment physical spaces: augmented reality tools can dynamically overlay data layers and context sensitive virtual information ( Klopfer and Squire, 2008; Wu et al., 2013).

Level of Adoption in Educational Practice

Place-based learning could be said to pre-date formal classroom based learning in the traditional sense of work based learning (e.g., apprenticeships), or informal learning (e.g., informal language learning). Aspects of place-based learning have a long heritage, such as environmental education and learning though overcoming neighborhood challenge, with the focus on taking account of learning opportunities "beyond the schoolhouse gate" ( Theobald and Curtiss, 2000). Place-based learning aligns with current pedagogical interests in education that is "multidisciplinary, experiential, and aligned with cultural and ecological sustainability" ( Webber and Miller, 2016, p.1067).

Learning With Robots

Relevance to Effective Educational Theories

Learning through interaction and then reflecting upon the outcomes of these interactions prompted Papert (1980) to develop the Logo Turtles. It can be argued that these turtles were one of the first robots to be used in schools whose theoretical premises were grounded within a Constructivist approach to learning. Constructivism translates into a pedagogy where students actively engage in experimental endeavors often based within real-world problem solving undertakings. This was how the first turtles were used to assist children to understand basic mathematical concepts. Logo turtles have morphed into wheeled robots in current Japanese classrooms where 11- and 12-year olds learn how to program them and then compete in teams to create the code needed to guide their robots safely through an obstacle course. This latter approach encourages children to "Think and Learn Together with Information and Communication Technology" as discussed by Dawes and Wegerif (2004). Vygotsky's theoretical influence is then foregrounded in this particular pedagogical context, where his sociocultural theory recognizes and emphasizes the role of language within any social interaction to prompt cognitive development.

Research Evidence About the Effectiveness of the Proposed Pedagogies

Relation to the Development of Twenty-First Century Skills

Teaching a robot to undertake a task through specific instructions mimics the way human teachers behave with pupils when they impart a rule set or heuristics to the pupils using a variety of rhetoric techniques in reaction to the learner's latest attempt at completing a given task. This modus operandi has been well documented by Jerome Bruner and colleagues and has been termed as "scaffolding" ( Wood et al., 1979). This latter example illustrates a growing recognition of the expanding communicative and expressive potential found through working with robots and encouraging teamwork and collaboration.

Innovative Aspects of Pedagogy

The robot can undertake a number of roles, with different levels of involvement in the learning task. Some of the examples mentioned above demonstrate the robot taking on a more passive role ( Mubin et al., 2013). This is when it can be used to teach programming, such as moving the robot on a physical route with many obstacles. Robots can also act as peers and learn together with the student or act as a teacher itself. The "interactive cat" (iCat) developed by Philips Research is an example of a robotic teacher helping language learning. It has a mechanical rendered cat face and can express emotion. This was an important feature with respect to social supportiveness, an important attribute belonging to human tutors. Research showed that social supportive behavior exhibited by the robot tutor had a positive effect on students' learning. The supportive behaviors exhibited by iCat tutor were non-verbal behavior, such as smiling, attention building, empathy, and communicativeness.

Level of Adoption in Educational Practice

Interest in learning with robots in the classroom and beyond is growing but purchasing expensive equipment which will require technical support can prevent adoption. There are also ethical issues that need to be addressed since "conversations" with embodied robots that can support both learning and new forms of assessment must all sustain equity within an ethical framework. As yet these have not been agreed within the AI community.

Learning With Drones

Relevance to Effective Educational Theories

Outdoor fieldwork is a long-standing student-centered pedagogy across a range of disciplines, which is increasingly supported by information technology ( Thomas and Munge, 2015, 2017). Within this tradition, drone-based learning, a recent innovation, is being used to support fieldwork by enhancing students' capability to explore outdoor physical environments. When students engage in outdoor learning experiences, reflect on those experiences, conceptualize their learning and experiment with new actions, they are engaging in experiential learning ( Kolb, 1984). The combination of human senses with the multimedia capabilities of a drone (image and video capture) means that the learning experience can be rich and multimodal. Another key aspect is that learning takes place through research, scientific data collection and analysis; drones are typically used to assist with data collection from different perspectives and in places that can be difficult to access. In the sphere of informal and leisure learning in places such as nature reserves and cultural heritage sites ( Staiff, 2016), drone-based exploration is based on discovery and is a way to make the visitor experience more attractive.

Research Evidence About the Effectiveness of the Proposed Pedagogies

There is not yet much research evidence on drone-based learning, but there are some case studies, teachers' accounts based on observations of their students, and pedagogically-informed suggestions for how drones may be applied to educational problems and the development of students' knowledge and practical skills. For example, a case study conducted in Malaysia with postgraduate students taking a MOOC ( Zakaria et al., 2018) was concerned with students working on a video creation task using drones, in the context of problem-based learning about local issues. The data analysis showed how active the students had been during a task which involved video shooting and editing/production. In the US, it was reported that a teacher introduced drones to a class of elementary students with autism in order to enhance their engagement and according to the teacher the results were "encouraging" since the students stayed on task better and were more involved with learning ( Joch, 2018). In the context of education in Australia, Sattar et al. (2017) give suggestions for using drones to develop many kinds of skills, competences and understanding in various disciplines, also emphasizing the learners' active engagement.

Relation to the Development of Twenty-First Century Skills

Sattar et al. (2017) argue that using drone technology will prepare and equip students with the technical skills and expertise which will be in demand in future, enhance their problem-solving skills and help them cope with future technical and professional requirements; students can be challenged to develop skills in problem-solving, analysis, creativity and critical thinking. Other ideas put forward in the literature suggest that drone-based learning can stimulate curiosity to see things that are hidden from view, give experience in learning through research and analyzing data, and it can help with visual literacies including collecting visual data and interpreting visual clues. Another observation is that drone-based learning can raise issues of privacy and ethics, stimulating discussion of how such technologies should be used responsibly when learning outside the classroom.

Innovative Aspects of Pedagogy

Drones enable learners to undertake previously impossible actions on field trips, such as looking inside inaccessible places or inspecting a landscape from several different perspectives. There is opportunity for rich exploration of physical objects and spaces. Drone-based learning can be a way to integrate skills and literacies, particularly orientation and motor skills with digital literacy. It is also a new way to integrate studies with real world experiences, showing students how professionals including land surveyors, news reporters, police officers and many others use drones in their work. Furthermore, it has been proposed as an assistive technology, enabling learners who are not mobile to gain remote access to sites they would not be able to visit ( Mangina et al., 2016).

Level of Adoption in Educational Practice

Accounts of adoption into educational practice suggest that early adopters with an interest in technology have been the first to experiment with drones. There are more accounts of adoption in community settings, professional practice settings and informal learning than in formal education at present. For example, Hodgson et al. (2018) describe how ecologists use drones to monitor wildlife populations and changes in vegetation. Drones can be used to capture images of an area from different angles, enabling communities to collect evidence of environmental problems such as pollution and deforestation. They are used after earthquakes and hurricanes, to assess the damage caused by these disasters, to locate victims, to help deliver aid, and to enhance understanding of assistance needs ( Sandvik and Lohne, 2014). They also enable remote monitoring of illegal trade without having to confront criminals.

Citizen Inquiry

Citizen science is an increasingly popular activity that has the potential to support growth and development in learning science. Active participation by the public in scientific research encourages this. This is due to its potential to educate the public-including young people-and to support the development of skills needed for the workplace, and contribute to findings of real science research. An experience that allows people to become familiar with the work of scientists and learn to make their own science has potential for learning. Citizen science activities can take place online on platforms such as Zooniverse, which hosts some of the largest internet-based citizen science projects or nQuire ( nQuire.org.uk), which scaffolds a wide range of inquiries, or can be offline in a local area (e.g., a bioblitz). In addition, mobile and networked technologies have opened up new possibilities for these investigations (see e.g., Curtis, 2018).

Relevance to Effective Educational Theories

Most current citizen science initiatives engage the general public in some way. For example, they may be in the role of volunteers, often non-expert individuals, in projects generated by scientists such as species recognition and counting. In these types of collaboration the public contributes to data collection and analysis tasks such as observation and measurement. The key theory which underpins this work is that of inquiry learning. " Inquiry-based learning is a powerful generalized method for coming to understand the natural and social world through a process of guided investigation" ( Sharples et al., 2013, p.38). It has been described as a powerful way to encourage learning by encouraging learners to use higher-order thinking skills during the conduct of inquiries and to make connections with their world knowledge.

Inquiry learning is a pedagogy with a long pedigree. First proposed by Dewey as learning through experience it came to the fore in the discovery learning movement of the sixties. Indeed, the term citizen inquiry has been coined which " fuses the creative knowledge building of inquiry learning with the mass collaborative participation exemplified by citizen science, changing the consumer relationship that most people have with research to one of active engagement" ( Sharples et al., 2013, p.38).

Researchers using this citizen inquiry paradigm have described how it " shifts the emphasis of scientific inquiry from scientists to the general public, by having non-professionals (of any age and level of experience) determine their own research agenda and devise their own science investigations underpinned by a model of scientific inquiry. It makes extensive use of web 2.0 and mobile technologies to facilitate massive participation of the public of any age, including youngsters, in collective, online inquiry-based activities" ( Herodotou et al., 2017b). This shift offers more opportunities for learning in these settings.

Research Evidence About the Effectiveness of the Proposed Pedagogies

Research has shown that learning can be developed in citizen science projects. Herodotou et al. (2018) citing a review by Bonney et al. (2009) have found that systematic involvement in citizen science projects produces learning outcomes in a number of ways, including increasing accuracy and degree of self-correction of observations. A number of studies have examined the learning which takes place during the use of iSpot (see Scanlon et al., 2014; Silvertown et al., 2015). Preliminary results showed that novice users can reach a fairly sophisticated understanding of identification over time ( Scanlon et al., 2014). Also, Aristeidou et al. (2017, p 252) examined citizen science activities on nQuire, and reported that some participants perceived learning as a reason for feeling satisfied with their engagement, with comments such as "insight into some topics" and "new information."

Through an online survey, Edwards et al. (2017) reported that citizen science participants of the UK Wetland Bird Survey and the Nest Record Scheme had learned on various dimensions. This was found to be related in part to their prior levels of education. Overall, there is a growing number of studies investigating the relationship between citizen science and learning with some positive indications that projects can be designed to encourage learning (Further studies on learning from citizen science are also discussed by Ballard et al., 2017, and Boakes et al., 2016).

Relation to the Development of Twenty-First Century Skills

The skills required by citizens in the twenty-first century are those derived from citizen science projects. They " need the skills and knowledge to solve problems, evaluate evidence, and make sense of complex information from various sources." ( Ferguson et al., 2017, p.12). As noted by OECD (2015) a significant skill students need to develop is learn to " think like a scientist." This is perceived as an essential skill across professions and not only the science-related ones. In particular, STEM education and jobs are no longer viewed as options for the few or for the "gifted." " Engagement with STEM can develop critical thinking, teamwork skills, and civic engagement. It can also help people cope with the demands of daily life. Enabling learners to experience how science is made can enhance their content knowledge in science, develop scientific skills and contribute to their personal growth. It can also increase their understanding of what it means to be a scientist" ( Ferguson et al., 2017, p.12).

Innovative Aspects of Pedagogy

One of the innovations of this approach is that it enables potentially any citizen to engage and understand scientific activities that are often locked behind the walls of experimental laboratories. Thinking scientifically should not be restricted to scientists; it should be a competency that citizens develop in order to engage critically and reflect on their surroundings. Such skills will enable critical understanding of public debates such as fake news and more active citizenship. Technologically, the development of these skills can be supported by platforms such as nQuire, the vision of which is to scaffold the process of scientific research and facilitate development of relevant skills amongst citizens.

Level of Adoption in Educational Practice

Citizen science activities are mainly found in informal learning settings, with rather limited adoption to formal education. " For example, the Natural History Museum in London offers citizen science projects that anyone can join as an enjoyable way to interact with nature. Earthworm Watch is one such project that runs every spring and autumn in the UK. It is an outdoor activity that asks people to measure soil properties and record earthworms in their garden or in a local green space. Access to museums such as the Natural History Museum is free of charge allowing all people, no matter what their background, to interact with such activities and meet others with similar interests." ( Ferguson et al., 2017, p.13) At the moment, adoption is dependent on individual educators rather than a policy. Two Open University examples are the incorporation of the iSpot platform into a range of courses from short courses such as Neighborhood Nature to MOOCs such as An introduction to Ecology on the FutureLearn platform. In recent years there are more accounts of citizen science projects within school settings (see e.g., Doyle et al., 2018; Saunders et al., 2018; Schuttler et al., 2018).

Discussion

In this paper, we discussed six innovative approaches to teaching and learning that originated from seven Innovating Pedagogy reports ( Sharples et al., 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016; Ferguson et al., 2017, 2019), drafted between 2012 and 2019 by leading academics in Educational Technology at the OU and institutions in the US, Singapore, Israel, and Norway. Based upon an extensive peer-review by seven OU authors, evidence and impact of six promising innovative approaches were gathered, namely formative analytics, teachback, place-based learning, learning with robots, learning with drones, and citizen inquiry. For these six approaches there is strong or emerging evidence that they can effectively contribute to the development of skills and competences such as critical thinking, problem-solving, digital literacy, thinking like a scientist, group work, and affective development.

The maturity of each pedagogy in terms of evidence generation varies with some pedagogies such as learning with drones being less mature and others such as formative analytics being more advanced. In Table 1, we used the evidence classifications in Figures 1, 2 to provide our own assessment of the overall quality of evidence (strength of evidence and level of confidence (scale 1-5) based on NESTA's standards of evidence shown in Figure 2) for each pedagogy, as a means to identify gaps in current knowledge and direct future research efforts.

Table 1. Future directions of selected pedagogies.

Figure 2. Standards of evidence by Nesta.

The proposed pedagogies have great potential in terms of reducing the distance between aspirations or vision for the future of education and current educational practice. This is evident in their relevance to effective educational theories including experiential learning, inquiry learning, discovery learning, and self-regulated learning, all of which are interactive and engaging ways of learning. Also, the review of existing evidence showcases their potential to support learning processes and desirable learning outcomes in both the cognitive and emotional domain. Yet, this list of pedagogies is not exhaustive; additional pedagogies that could potentially meet the selection criteria-and which can be found in the Innovating Pedagogy report series-are for example, playful learning emphasizing the need for play, exploration and learning through failure, virtual studios stressing learning flexibility through arts and design, and dynamic assessment during which assessors support learners in identifying and overcoming learning difficulties.

Conclusions

In this paper we presented six approaches to teaching and learning and stressed the importance of evidence in transforming the educational practice. We devised and applied an integrated framework for selection that could be used by both researchers and educators (teachers, pre-service teachers, educational policy makers etc.) as an assessment tool for reflecting on and assessing specific pedagogical approaches, either currently in practice or intended to be used in education in the future. Our framework goes beyond existing frameworks that focus primarily on the development of skills and competences for the future, by situating such development within the context of effective educational theories, evidence from research studies, innovative aspects of the pedagogy, and its adoption in educational practice. We made the case that learning is a science and that the testing of learning interventions and teaching approaches before applying these to practice should be a requirement for improving learning outcomes and meeting the expectations of an ever-changing society. We wish this work to spark further dialogue between researchers and practitioners and signal the necessity for evidence-based professional development that will inform and enhance the teaching practice.

Author Contributions

CH: introduction, discussion, confusion sections, revision of manuscript. MS: teachback. MG: place-based learning. BR: formative analytics. ES: citizen inquiry. AK-H: learning with drones. DW: learning with robots.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

References

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Innovative Pedagogies of the Future: An Evidence-Based Selection

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There is a widespread notion that educational systems should empower learners with skills and competences to cope with a constantly changing landscape. Reference is often made to skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, collaborative skills, innovation, digital literacy, and adaptability.

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Things to think about: How can we tailor this toward math? What are you currently doing with your scholars?

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How To Use Google Classroom Tutorial For Teachers & Students - 2022 Guide

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Things to think about: How can we tailor this toward math? What are you currently doing with your scholars?

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Things to think about: How can we tailor this toward math? What are you currently doing with your scholars?

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Things to think about: How can we tailor this toward math? What are you currently doing with your scholars?

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Loom Screen Recording for Teachers [Loom Tutorial 2020]

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Things to think about: How can we tailor this toward math? What are you currently doing with your scholars?

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Things to think about: How can we tailor this toward math? What are you currently doing with your scholars?

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In traditional math classrooms-and in classrooms where challenging, unfamiliar work is often assigned, more generally-the progression " I do, we do, you do" often becomes the default approach to learning, according to researcher and professor of mathematics at Simon Fraser University, Peter Liljedahl.

It makes sense in many cases, particularly when difficult concepts need to be addressed in time windows that are compressed by bell schedules, holiday breaks, andsummer vacation.But used too frequently, this approach, Liljedahl recently told the Cult of Pedagogy, inhibits higher order thinking and results in students who "mimic" teachers. Students who engage in too much rote work miss out on some of the challenging, sometimes confusing work that builds up their self esteem to face difficult thinking tasks in the future.

"By and large students spend most of their class time not thinking, at least not in ways we know they need to think in order to be successful in mathematics." Liljedahl explains. "If they're not thinking, they're not learning."

Liljedahl, the author of Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning advocates for "Thinking Classrooms", which offers a different take on how classroom work is organized, how tasks are assigned, and how students learn and work together. His conclusions are based on more than a decade of research, experimentation, and collaboration with over 400 K-12 teachers.

In a 2017 article for Edutopia, Liljedahl clarified that a "non-thinking" classroom is "predicated on an assumption that the students either could not or would not think." When presented with difficult problems, students in these classrooms have a hard time pushing through to find their own solutions, he argued, and often wait for teachers to step in to do the heavy lifting for them.

To stimulate independent thinking, Liljedahl says, reorganize some of your classroom approaches: Start with hard puzzles and problems that push kids to their limits; confront the fundamental passivity of classroom seating; and use highly structured group activities to promote discussion, peer review, and iterative thinking.

Starting With 'Thinking Tasks'

Instead of starting a lesson with direct instruction, give students novel "thinking tasks" they can work on, ideally in groups. Liljedahl describes these tasks as problem solving activities and mental puzzles that, early on in the school year, should be "highly engaging, non-curricular tasks" to motivate students and get them in the mindset of challenging themselves. As the school year progresses and students become more accustomed to this mode of working and thinking, the activities and challenges can be replaced with tasks directly related to the curriculum.

Liljedahl points out that the tasks should be carefully sequenced so they get incrementally more challenging. "The goal of thinking classrooms is not to get students to think about engaging with non-curricular tasks day in and day out-that turns out to be rather easy," he told Cult of Pedagogy. "Rather, the goal is to get more of your students thinking, and thinking for longer periods of time, within the context of curriculum, which leads to longer and deeper learning."

Liljedahl has a long list of sample "thinking tasks" to look through. They include challenging dice-related problems, such as: Imagine a typical 6-sided die, and notice that the sum of opposite faces is always seven. The one is across from the six, the two is across from the five, and so on. Now imagine that you were making your own six-sided die that did not have this restriction. How many different dice could be made?

Use Standing, Randomized Group Work

Central to Liljedahl's approach is student collaboration and group work. Instead of grouping students by ability, or allowing them to choose their own groups to work in, his research has shown him students work more effectively-and are more likely to contribute-in randomized groups. According to Liljedahl, interviews with students show that randomized groups "break down social barriers within the room, increase knowledge mobility, reduce stress, and increase enthusiasm for mathematics."

At Design39Campus, a K-8 school in San Diego, eighth grade math teacher Kyle Asmus puts Liljedahl's approach into practice by using a random group generator (such as this one from Classtools or this one from Keamk) to ensure that different kids work together across multiple exercises.

To ensure that all students feel included, Asmus assigns group roles: The scribe writes down possible solutions; the speaker communicates the group's thinking to the broader classroom; the inquirer asks the teacher questions; and the manager makes sure the rest of the group stays on track.

Having students stand while they engage in this collaborative, messy thinking is yet another way to engage them, according to Liljedahl: It makes them much less likely to withdraw from the work, or assume that others will handle it. "It turns out that when students are sitting, they feel anonymous," Liljedahl told Cult of Pedagogy. "And when students feel anonymous, they disengage."

Work on Non-Permanent, Vertical Surfaces

In a thinking classroom, students put notebooks away and participate in group work while standing at vertical non-permanent surfaces such as whiteboards, blackboards, or windows-surfaces that Liljedahl believes promote more risk-taking.

According to Liljedahl, his experimentation with students shows that when comparing a group working on a whiteboard versus a group working on flip chart paper, the group working on whiteboards start working within 20 seconds.

"They'll start making notations on the board. They'll try anything and everything because they feel like they can just erase it if it's wrong," he told Cult of Pedagogy. Meanwhile, students working on chart paper take upwards of three minutes to make a single notation, because, Liljedahl said, they often wait until what they write is perfect-"and that hesitation leads to a lower form of thinking."

Design39 students also practice Liljedahl's "vertical surfaces" learning technique, which Asmus says promotes "high quality collaboration" and facilitates "questions and rich conversations" among students. According to Asmus, when students are presented with challenging tasks and work vertically, the time for students to get to a task is not only quicker, but the time they spend on a task is longer.

The large surfaces spread out around the room also allow students to see the work their peers are doing in other groups, and build off of each other's understanding. "It makes it easy for the whole class to see what everybody else is doing so we can be inspired by each other's ideas," said Iniyaa, a student in Asmus' class.

Answer the Right Questions

As students work vertically in groups, teachers can easily see how they're progressing and bounce around the room. Questions will undoubtedly arise, but Liljedahl says teachers should avoid answering questions asked for the purpose of reducing student effort and getting to an answer more quickly-such as "is this right?" Instead, they should prioritize addressing student questions that will lead to further independent thinking.

In her elementary school classroom in Brooklyn, teacher Tori Filler says that instead of rushing to provide hints and solutions to the hard parts of a lesson, she often asks them to evaluate what's tough about it, and encourages them to sort it out on their own before stepping in to help.

If most of the class is struggling, ask more questions and turn the struggle into a productive discussion for everyone. Asking questions like "What makes this hard?" or "What have we tried?" gets students to think metacognitively and develop the skills to push through challenging work on their own.

Evaluate What You Value

To succeed in a thinking classroom, students need to develop skills like perseverance, academic courage, collaboration, and curiosity, among others. But according to Liljedahl, if we want students to develop these competencies, then we should find ways to evaluate them on it.

"What we choose to evaluate tells students what we value, and, in turn, students begin to value it as well," he writes.

He argues for a mix of both formative and summative assessment in math classrooms that focus less on end products and student ranking, and more on the work leading up to those end products and collaboration between groups to get there.

The educators at Bite Sized Learning, for example, suggest evaluating students on the work they produce, but also on how well they persevere and make an effort in response to challenges, how well they set individual goals and monitor progress toward achieving them, and how well they share information and resources with group members to solve problems and make decisions.

Liljedahl's own formative assessments focus on informing students "about where they are and where they're going in their learning." This can take the form of observations, check-for-understanding questions, or even unmarked quizzes. Summative assessments, meanwhile, "should focus more on the processes of learning than on the products, and should include the evaluation of both group and individual work," Liljedahl writes.

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How to Turn Your Math Classroom Into a 'Thinking Classroom'

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The researcher Peter Liljedahl evangelizes for practices that prioritize and stimulate more hard thinking in classrooms.

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Playlist of 6 Separate Podcasts for Teachers

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*Please submit 1 reflection per podcast. Please include the specific Podcast title in your reflection form (e.g. 6 Podcasts for Teachers - Easy EdTech Podcast).*

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1. Easy EdTech Podcast

Hosted by Monica Burns, this podcast for teachers provides clear and practical advice for both new and seasoned instructors around implementing EdTech in the classroom. Burns' approach provides many examples and tangible strategies you can use in your next lesson plan.

2. The 10-Minute Teacher Podcast

This is the first podcast I subscribed to, and I keep returning to it for inspiration and ideas to share with my students. Host Vicki Davis covers everything from augmented reality to escape rooms and other innovative techniques to try in the classroom.

I especially enjoy the guest interviews in which actual teachers share their ideas and strategies.

3. Beginning Teacher Talk

Although this podcast hosted by Dr. Lori Friesen has "beginning teacher" in the title, all teachers can benefit from tuning in. In this podcast for teachers, Dr. Friesen offers useful advice on typical first-year teacher struggles.

Topics include classroom management, working with parents, and developing creative techniques to use in the classroom.

4. The Burned-In Teacher Podcast

Amber Harper turns teacher burnout on its head through her podcast for teachers. In this series, Harper shares strategies with teachers on the verge of burnout, supports them through their burnout, and encourages them to grow through this experience.

5. EduMagic: Future Teacher Podcast

Shameless plug alert! I host the EduMagic podcast, which provides strategies for aspiring educators from kindergarten through college. My approach gives future teachers the confidence to try new things in their field placements, classrooms, and student teaching experiences, combining theory and practice.

6. This Teacher Life

This podcast for teachers is hosted by one of my favorite Instagram teachers, Monica Genta. Genta's approach to teaching and learning is not only practical but fun for educators and students. She offers a wealth of inspiring ideas that teachers can put into practice right away.

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Listen to These 6 Best Podcasts for Teachers | BestColleges

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Podcasts let you learn on the go, making them effective learning tools for teachers. Check out these great podcasts for teachers and budding instructors.

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Playlist of 17 Separate Videos on Classroom Management and Student Engagement Practices

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Playlist of 17 Separate Videos on Classroom Management and Student Engagement Practices

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*Please submit 1 reflection per video. Please include the specific video title in your reflection form (e.g. Classroom Management and Student Engagement Practices- How to Engage Underperforming Students).*

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Olympia Della Flora: Creative ways to get kids to thrive in school | TED Talk

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Matthew Lacayo: Reforming Math Education

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Matthew Lacayo, a junior from Whitney High School, is obsessed with math. In his free time, he has taken up learning calculus, writing proofs, and creating his own math questions. He hopes that with his talk, "Reforming Math Education," he can inspire others to share his passion for problem solving.

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Dixie Ross has taught every level of math offered in Texas public high schools and trained hundreds of AP calculus teachers in summer institutes. Over 40 years, she's developed strong views on what's wrong with American math education, but one problem has rankled her since she first walked into a classroom: unequal access to higher-level courses.

Too many students are held back from advanced math that could provide direct pathways into college level math and STEM jobs, said Ross, a former presidential awardee for her teaching. What irks her most is that decisions about who gets tracked into or out of these higher-level courses are too often based on a student's race.

"There are kids who can be successful in math, but the opportunities are not there for them," Ross told me, in an eye-opening conversation that came in response to a survey The Hechinger Report sent to our readers last month. "I wish I had some magic bullet solution but haven't found it yet. And I have been looking for four decades. "

Ross was among more than 465 Hechinger Report readers who responded to our survey, with thoughtful feedback that is already informing our coverage of America's math crisis. We welcome hearing from readers as we visit classrooms and campuses, digging into questions about what kind of math should be taught at what age, and how best to boost lagging performance, close racial achievement gaps and help students catch up after the pandemic.

"There are a lot of holes and gaps from distance learning. The math content got shrunk down and the fluency just wasn't there. It's heartbreaking."
Giavanni Coleman, math teacher in Haywood, California

Several people pointed to gaps in availability of courses in STEM classes, which should not come as a surprise: Two out of five Black and Latino students surveyed for a recent joint report from the Education Trust and Equal Opportunity Schools said they have a passion for studying science, technology and engineering and want to go to college, yet only three percent were enrolled in AP STEM classes.

The issue of learning loss and recent NAEP test score declines - the largest ever recorded - also loomed large in survey responses, highlighting the devastating impact the pandemic had on students and families, in particular in schools that serve large numbers of Black and Latino students.

So did the issue of U.S. student performance compared with other countries: Our 15-year-olds rank behind 30 countries and one region on one international test, while our fourth graders trail 14 countries on another. So it makes sense that some teachers who answered the survey want to know how high-performing countries are teaching math, along with what cultural barriers might be in the way. "Are there schools that replicate best practices of countries like Japan and Finland and demonstrate better outcomes?" one educator asked.
Related: Plunging NAEP scores make clear the long and difficult road ahead to pandemic recovery
Survey results also confirmed there is a lot of anxiety about math. Some of it arises from recent test scores showing dismal middle school performance: Students who started middle school early in the pandemic lost more ground in math than any other group and are still struggling.

Fears that teachers are insufficiently trained in math and that poor math skills harm America's competitiveness and weaken our ability to fill critical jobs came up often in our survey. So did worries that high schools are placing too much emphasis on calculus and not enough on practical skills like data analysis and statistics for an increasingly high-tech world.

Several readers noted that families need more support than ever in overcoming their own math fears, along with additional tools and strategies for playfully supporting and supplementing their children's math knowledge. That means challenging age-old assumptions that some people simply aren't good at math.

And some teachers had specific ideas about what must change in math education: Giavanni Coleman, a 20-year veteran who teaches fifth- and sixth-grade math in Hayward, California, told us that schools must build a stronger foundation in math early on, and wants to see more investment in teacher training and early childhood math to help infuse a love of numbers at a young age.

"It takes time, and money, and human capital and training," Coleman told me in a follow-up conversation.

Coleman was also among the many teachers worried about pandemic learning loss. "There are a lot of holes and gaps from distance learning," she said. "The math content got shrunk down and the fluency just wasn't there. It's heartbreaking."

Here are a few top themes that concerned our readers:

Reducing anxiety or fear of math among students and helping them to understand why it matters.

Highlighting the importance of basic arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) in math teaching and focusing on establishing strong foundations before advancing to more conceptual lessons.

Learning in more detail about what effective math instruction looks like for preschoolers and kindergarteners

Understanding why subjects like algebra and calculus have become so important in college admissions and whether statistics or data science should matter more, along with how curricula are chosen and which work best

Tracing how math instruction has changed throughout history and ensuring that math lessons aren't outdated

Analyzing how math instruction and student performance changed after the introduction of the Common Core standards

Related: After common core a mysterious spike in failure rate among New York High School students
We also discovered common themes that concerned particular groups.

Parents were most likely to mention concerns about math curricula, math anxiety and their hope that math instruction would place greater emphasis on problem-solving instead of memorization and repetition.

Respondents from higher education were also most likely to mention reducing anxiety or fear of math among their students, along with the hope they can learn to both love math and understand why it matters to their careers.

And all groups worry that there aren't enough sufficiently qualified and experienced math teachers, in part due to low pay and poor working conditions.

Teacher Ross believes in recruiting great math students to become math teachers and wants to put all students on track to take advanced math unless they opt out of it. They should then be required to take any classes they fail until they pass, she thinks.

"Are there schools that replicate best practices of countries like Japan and Finland and demonstrate better outcomes?"
Educator who replied to Hechinger's survey

"We need to make sure kids understand that their decision to take or not take certain math classes will largely determine the economic opportunities that will be available to them," she said.

The survey results will be enormously helpful, but one of the most important ways of improving math came from a student I contacted after speaking with Ross. Carla Edith Brayton was an undocumented immigrant from Mexico living in Texas when she landed in Ross's math classes. She worked after school and nights at a local McDonald's, and while she'd always been good at math and loved the subject, she often fell asleep in class and felt discouraged.

Ross never allowed her to give up and pushed her to apply for scholarships and attend college. Brayton is now 29, a civil engineer and mother of two, the first in her family to attend college - she graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2017 - and to own a home. She loves her job and said none of her success would have happened if Ross had not encouraged her.

"Someone simply took the time to notice and believed in me. That's what changed my life," Brayton told me, noting that she has found a way to pay it forward by speaking at school career days, describing her background and the higher-level math classes she might otherwise have been shut out of.

"Education is the key for all people," she said. "It certainly was for me."
This story about math education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. The Gates Foundation has recently begun a major funding effort for math education projects around the country, and is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report. Sign up for our weekly newsletters.

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COLUMN: How can we improve math education in America? Help us count the ways

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Among the top themes were unequal access to higher-level math courses, how best to close racial achievement gaps, helping students catch up after the pandemic, assessing why American students lag behind in math.

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Playing games can be a great way to practice or review skills related to algebraic expressions.

For some students, learning algebraic expressions feels like drudgery, but it doesn't have to be that way. These three activities will get your students moving, talking, and thinking deeply about algebraic expressions, all while having fun. They're also a great way to practice or review skills that have already been introduced and explicitly taught.

3 Ways to Have Fun With Algebraic Expressions

1. Vocabulary Four Corners. Many students are overwhelmed by the prospect of translating a word problem into an algebraic expression. To help students feel confident recognizing keywords and appropriately converting them into numerical operations, you can introduce students to Vocabulary Four Corners.

In this version of Four Corners, you invite all students to move around the room based on a given vocabulary word. First, designate each corner of your classroom as an operation-addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. Next, have all students stand behind their desks. Then, present students with a key vocabulary word and instruct them to move to the corresponding corner of the room. Once students have selected a corner, you can give them time to discuss their choice in groups and then call on a few students to share their thinking with the class.

This activity is a great way to help students review keywords while getting active in the classroom, moving around, and having a chance to talk in groups. If you want to make the activity more challenging, you can ask students to explain their thinking by making up sample story problems that use the given keyword.

2. How'd You Do It? This next activity is a great way to help students recognize the multitude of possibilities when working with algebraic expressions. There are a few different ways to implement this activity, depending on the amount of time you want to spend, but the basic structure is this: You present students with an algebraic term, and they come up with as many different algebraic expressions as possible that would simplify to your given term.

One way to do this is with a gallery walk. First, you need to post chart paper around the classroom and put one term on the top of each piece of paper. Next, split students into small groups and assign each group a piece of chart paper. Then, give students a set amount of time to spend writing their algebraic expressions on the chart paper before moving on to the next piece of paper as a group.

Once every group has had a chance to work on each piece of paper, you can then give students additional time to walk around the room and look at all of the expressions. Students may notice patterns in the types of numbers or operations their classmates used, or they may identify expressions that do not simplify to the given number. Students should share these thoughts within their small groups and then with the class at large.

If you don't want to use a gallery-walk approach, this same activity can work with small groups seated around the classroom. You can provide students with a term and a given amount of time to work together to come up with as many expressions as possible. You can then have groups share their expressions. If you want to make the activity more of a competition, you can even assign points for the numbers of unique expressions each group finds.

This activity helps students get creative and recognize how many possibilities exist when creating equivalent expressions. Depending on how difficult you want to make the activity, you can set additional parameters: Students must use negative numbers, students must use at least three operations, students must use division, etc.

An example of what students might come up with follows.

3. Equivalent Expression Stories. This last activity is another great way to have students practice recognizing and creating equivalent expressions. For this activity to work, you'll need to split students up into groups and, ideally, have them seated in columns or rows.

The first student in each column/row will be given a piece of paper with an algebraic expression on it. They will then write an equivalent expression underneath it and fold the top of the paper down. Then, they will pass the paper back to the next student. The second student won't be able to see the original expression, only the one written by the first student.

The second student will then repeat the process: Write an equivalent expression, fold the paper, pass it back. Once the paper reaches the last student, you will collect each group's work and show each equivalent expression story to the class.

Students can then discuss how each expression changed as it was passed, whether each expression remained equivalent to the original one, and any patterns they noticed. Similarly to the "How'd You Do It?" activity, you can scale up the difficulty by setting parameters around what students should use in their expressions.

A sample expression story might look like this:

Original expression: 5 x + 3 y

There are plenty of ways to personalize math activities to best fit the needs and interests of your students, but these three activities provide a jumping-off point to get your students engaged and excited about algebraic expressions.

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3 Fun Activities to Teach Algebraic Expressions

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Using fun activities to teach algebra gives kids a chance to review lessons on algebraic expressions in collaboration with their classmates.

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Transformation of the mathematics classroom with the internet...

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Transformation of the mathematics classroom with the internet...

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1 Introduction

The central theme for this special issue is the evolution and transformation of the classroom with the growing integration of the internet and interactive digital devices into mathematics teaching and mathematics teacher education. At the time of finalising this special issue, the entire globe is in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of the extreme relevance of online and blended learning programmes at the current time, an editorial on the timeliness of this issue will be included in this special issue. Since the 1970s technology has changed mathematics education and it will certainly be a major factor in how education in the future differs from education today. Educators realise that we need to rethink the entire model of education and redesign it so that it is more student-centred. This means adopting new technologies, but it also means giving up on certain attitudes about what constitutes educational success. These new technologies also seriously influence the nature of mathematics, e.g., application of procedures is becoming less important and new ways of validation (and practising in general) in mathematics are being developed. However, it is beyond the scope of this special issue to explore this matter in depth.

With the rapid development of new digital technology, specific characteristics of these developments are continuously changing. After the baby boomers and the Generation X groups, new micro-generations evolved in cycles of about four years, giving birth to new concerns, new motivations and new challenges in all aspects of their lives (Morin 2016). These new micro-generations are as follows:

The Echo-Boomers or first digital natives Gen Y, born between 1989 and 1994; with the establishment of the Web, they grew up with the new technology.

For the net generation, often called Gen Z, born between 1994 and 1998, the internet is an essential part of their lives. They are sometimes called the hyper-connected 'selfie' generation and are attached to their smart phones as if they have become extensions of their personalities.

The Post-Millennial Generation Z or young mobile generation, born between 2002 and 2006, who did their learning through social networks and mobile technology.

The youngest group of students, born between 2006 and 2010, is named Gen Z-Silent Generation, who have been connected since birth.

Although the micro-generations differ, there are strong common characteristics-they multitask and want information quickly using visuals, sounds, and colour from multiple multimedia sources in a novel or useful way (Dineva et al. 2019). Our current students have grown up in a digital world of computers, internet, and social online media such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Google and other social networks (Jukes et al. 2010). They learn by interacting with other individuals online. Many students have a blog on the Web and a profile on the internet (Curtis 2009). They like to be active and collaborate using the latest technology and visualisation opportunities. Today's students prefer seeking their own information rather than being presented with it (Morin 2016), they prefer on-demand access to knowledge, disseminated over the internet, and absorb knowledge rapidly across different channels. Using networks to share and create new knowledge, they are in frequent contact with their friends.

In a special issue of ZDM in 2012 (Borba and Llinares 2012), the emergent field regarding online mathematics teacher education showed key topics such as communities and networks of teachers in online environments; sustainability of these communities; knowledge-building practices in technology-mediated work group interactions; and online interactions among teachers. These topics also gave rise to new theoretical developments. The exponential development of interactive digital devices, and the use of the internet in teaching mathematics and online learning environment since the last special issue, support the need to frame some of these initiatives developing in the world (Borba et al. 2013; Borba et al. 2016; Trouche et al. 2013).

The development of digital technology use in mathematics education has been taking place in distinct phases (Borba et al. 2016). In recent years, the development of the internet has introduced a relationship revolution-communication has changed dramatically (Borba et al. 2016; Engelbrecht and Harding 2005a, b; Van de Sande 2011). This development brings us the possibility of two-way communication via the internet, and enhanced opportunities for collaborative learning. It also brings us the personalisation of the internet through personal devices. The role of social media is becoming increasingly important, moving the education process from a 'push' to a student-centred 'pull' approach in which the students become an integral part of many facets of the process (Martinovic et al. 2013). Furthermore, the introduction of digital resources and tools questions the efficacy of current teacher practices and traditional classrooms (Drijvers et al. 2013; Gueudet and Pepin 2020). Social aspects of the internet become more and more relevant and notions such as 'humans-with-media' emphasise that if media are changed, the entire knowledge-acquiring process may change (Borba et al. 2018). Moreover, as humans develop and construct new media, these media seem to transform and 'construct' a new human.

In this development process, the classroom, as we know it, may change entirely from a physical area with defined boundaries to a virtual environment including various components that will probably be determined by the student rather than only by the teacher. Mobile technology, personal learning environments, digital learning objects and other artefacts are 'stretching' the classroom, transforming the classroom, to the extent that it can hardly be recognised as such. Currently it seems clear that digital technology is 'deconstructing' the notion of the classroom. Flipped classrooms change the notion of what is in and outside of the classroom, and also change the roles of students and teachers. There is a profusion of online resources (e.g., widgets, videos), designed with respect to specific mathematical content, which transforms the presentation of content and allows students access to solving mathematical tasks and sharing their mathematical explorations. Our students also have to evaluate the quality of the knowledge disseminated over the internet-they need to be able to select valid resources.

On the other hand, the development of mobile digital technologies, such as forums, wikis, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook is allowing the new generation of different kinds of learning opportunities, supported in new social interaction spaces. These interactive technologies allow students to collaborate with their peers when they use multimedia and the internet, allowing new social ways of knowledge construction (Goos and Geiger 2012; Llinares and Olivero 2008). Finally, different blends are being forged between face-to-face education and online distance education.

In this paper, following mainly Borba et al. ( 2016) and other surveys and descriptions of the state of the art (Borba et al. 2013; Silverman and Hoyos 2018), we aim to support the building of the domain blended mathematics education. By addressing three main strands, the different papers in this special issue provide particular views and describe steps in each of the following areas:

Principles of design: How mathematics educators enact the principles of design in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and blended approaches to designing professional development opportunities and mathematics teaching contexts.

Social interaction and construction of knowledge: How technologies in online contexts support social interaction among participants as a medium to support mathematical knowledge construction and teaching competences.

Tools and resources: Different meanings associated with the idea of online resources and how their use is conceptualised in different mathematics teaching contexts, given the emergence of new online mathematics resources and ways of teaching.

While the papers in this issue address some of the topics in these domains, this collection is far from exploring all the different paths of digital technology in the mathematics classroom. We conclude the paper by identifying some trends and issues to be developed in the future.

Before we go any further, we should mention that, as we were finalising this paper, it became clear that the COVID-19 crisis was more than 'a little cold' as some prominent politicians claimed. The COVID-19 pandemic has 'paused' the world, and it has paused many mathematics education activities (e.g.. ICME 14, PME 44). In a certain way it also paused our paper. It seemed odd to write about digital technology, without connecting it to the current situation, which strongly impacts the world-wide use of digital technology in teaching. On the one hand, the worldwide lockdown increases the rate of change of using digital technology in education but at the same time it creates an awareness of the need to feel connected to each other. Rather than rewriting the paper, we added a section at the end in which we 'blend' the formal conclusions of the paper with questions and doubts that arose from the 'agency' of COVID-19, or that were catalysed by it.

2 How mathematics teacher educators enact the principles of design in blended approaches and MOOCs

Scaling up of professional development is concerned with how the programme is implemented across multiple instructors and settings and about the participation effects, such as course participants' changes in practice. Some initiatives focused on identifying factors that contribute to the sustainability and scaling up of professional development (Goos et al. 2018), recognising that examining their impact is complex, and lacking solid frameworks to explain learning in open online settings (Joksimovic et al. 2018). Digital technologies allow new approaches to design, implement and analyse large scale professional development and determine the influence on teacher practice and student achievement (Bell et al. 2010). For example, the internet allows development of new approaches through which it is possible to support the sustainability and scaling up of professional development focused on the introduction of dynamic technologies in using Web-based toolkits (Clark-Wilson and Hoyles 2019). The growing activities of designing MOOCs and using blended learning approaches are defining new issues related to how design principles can be generated.

2.1 MOOCs

Borba et al. ( 2016) mentioned MOOCs as a relevant theme, as follows:

The potential of MOOCs to disrupt the institutional and hierarchical nature of traditional education, offering students opportunities to access courses without prerequisites, without fees (unless they require a record of course completion), and the potential of MOOCs to affect access to and the quality of mathematics education is not well understood. (p. 606)

Right now, the reflection on the design, implementation and sustainability of MOOCs in mathematics education, generates theoretically informed perspectives and how these issues can inform decision making.

The design of MOOCs in different cultural contexts places emphasis on key aspects such as the possibility of sharing materials and ideas, and implicates methodologies of mathematics teaching and the different theoretical frameworks used to support their designs. In this special issue, the two papers focused on MOOCs present different conceptual perspectives to support the principles of design. The common feature in both papers is how the principles of design were theoretically informed and how the conceptual frames influenced the implementation of MOOCs.

Taranto and Arzarello ( 2020) report on a conceptual framework that guided the design of their MOOC and its use in interpreting the dynamics characterising teacher education. The conceptual framework presents the necessary hybridisation of three different theoretical approaches for mathematics teacher education through MOOCs, namely, the meta-didactical transposition model, the instrumentation/ instrumentalisation process and the network of knowledge of connectivism. Taranto and Arzarello argue that the conceptual framework allows the identification of specific features of the new learning environments defined by the MOOCs-how the interactions between participants change their knowledge and beliefs.

Hollebrands and Lee ( 2020) adopted a different conceptual approach to report on the effects of design principles of MOOCs. They examined how design principles were enacted in the development of the MOOC and how these influenced the engagement of participants. The principles considered were self-directed learning, learning from multiple voices, job-connected learning and peer-supported learning. From these principles and using the Interconnected Model of Professional Growth (Clarke and Hollingsworth 2002), Hollebrands and Lee considered the ways in which elements of the external domain influenced the personal domain of participants. The conceptual framework used emphasises the teacher change occurring through the process of enacting and reflecting on practice. In particular, they studied how the personal domain of participants in the MOOCs-knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes-interacts, as participants engaged with and reflected upon elements from the external domain, namely, readings, tasks, and frameworks, that define the MOOCs. How design principles are enacted in the design of MOOCs and how they support the learning opportunities for participants became a point for reflection.

A common feature, in the paper of Taranto and Arzarello, and that of Hollebrands and Lee, is their reflection on how the design principles adopted by designers of MOOCs influence participants' personal and social aspects. However, the ideas that support the design principles differ. On the one hand, Hollebrands and Lee use research-based practices used in face-to-face mathematics teacher education and design principles for the online environment to frame their decisions. On the other hand, Taranto and Arzarello hybridise three theoretical perspectives on mathematics teaching and learning to create a new conceptual framework for the purpose of making decisions as designers, researchers and teacher educators.

Other issues are related to how designers consider time constraints to strengthen the impact of the interventions. Three of these needs can be identified. Firstly, an issue is how theoretical perspectives can help us to improve our understanding of the processes of design and implementation of MOOCs and blended initiatives. Secondly, we should identify factors contributing to learning and sustainability in the MOOCs and blended approaches-factors influencing teacher participation in these initiatives. Finally, we have to evaluate different MOOCs and blended learning approaches across the educational settings to provide information about the role played by different contextual and cultural variables.

2.2 Blended approaches

Blended learning provides students with both delivery options, whatever their current stage of development may be (Chaney 2016; Vasileiou 2009). By integrating online learning into the system, blended learning expands the learning environment into the virtual world where traditional limitations are removed. Through the online component, differentiation between student needs becomes easier and combines with the social aspect of the actual classroom to create a strong learning system.

A blended learning system includes the important face-to-face interaction that Vygotsky considered to be vital and thus provides all of the benefits of the social aspects of learning (Ting and Chao 2013). Blended learning recognises the need for peer interaction and practical application in order to bring learning to maturity. Blended learning engages students since it offers them an opportunity to develop their own opinions, consider new ideas in collaboration with other students online, and try out their own ideas in a relatively anonymous environment (Holley and Oliver 2010).

Three papers in this special issue describe blended approaches to professional development for mathematics teachers as a reply to contextual needs, namely, improving primary and middle teachers' mathematics knowledge for teaching, focusing on 'out-of-field' mathematics teachers, and supporting the introduction of technology in mathematics teaching. They describe professional development initiatives from Chile, Ireland, and South Africa. One other paper describes a blended approach for first year engineering mathematics in Australia.

Martinez, Guíñez, Zamora, Bustos and Rodríguez ( 2020) describe a blended learning professional development programme for primary and middle school teachers aimed at developing mathematical knowledge for teaching. The ways in which face-to-face workshops and virtual activities are integrated illustrates the use of design principles by an instructional model characterised by a learning sequence and a construction model. The construction model is formed by four types of activities: activation, analysis, institutionalisation and practice. The authors underline that the design principles allow participants to have a high level of autonomous self-directed online learning and have learning opportunities to unpack and analyse elementary mathematics from a teaching perspective. Three general principles are used to design and analyse the implementation of this programme: the constructivist view of learning; contextualised problem-based learning, and that the teaching of mathematics requires specific knowledge. These principles are operationalised during the design, for example by means of the design of online activities around contexts operating as a general frame to problematise various aspects of the content. This feature allows generated learning situations in which tasks help to develop different aspects of mathematics knowledge for teaching.

Goos, O'Donoghue, Ní Ríordáin, Faulkner, Hall and O'Meara ( 2020) focus their initiative on secondary teachers that have to teach mathematics with no formal training or education in the field- out-of-field teachers. They analyse the design principles underpinning the development and delivery of a blended learning programme of professional development for out-of-field teachers of secondary school mathematics in Ireland. Three theoretical frameworks informed their analysis of the blended learning design. The first framework examines definitions, dimensions, and rationales for blended learning, the second framework characterises out-of-field teaching as a boundary-crossing event, and the third concerns effective teacher professional development using structural and core features. They integrated these frameworks within a blended learning context, attempting to find out how such an environment contributes to effective professional learning for out-of-field mathematics teachers. They found that engagement is long in duration and intensive among participants, but also learnt that epistemic considerations must be addressed when professional mathematicians engage with school mathematics teachers in curriculum development. For example, the nature of blended learning deserved more attention because a better appreciation could lead to better learning opportunities and outcomes for teachers.

A relatively new development in the professional development of teachers, with a strong foundation in mathematics education, is called lesson study. It is based on teachers collaborating to design lessons. This collaboration, however, can be challenging for isolated teachers who cannot communicate face-to-face on a regular basis. Joubert, Callaghan and Engelbrecht ( 2020) conducted a study in which they presented a blended mode course in the use of technology in teaching to practising teachers from different subject fields, including mathematics. The purpose of this course was to develop teachers' knowledge and skills in the use and integration of mobile technology in their teaching. In their study they investigated how lesson study can be adapted into a blended format to support isolated teachers who cannot meet face-to-face on a regular basis, using an Learning Management System (LMS) to communicate. They identified aspects that should be incorporated into a blended lesson study process to support isolated teachers in teaching with technology. A framework with three dimensions emerged, supported by aspects relating to teachers' collaboration, to the instructional design, and to the iterative improvement process.

Quinn and Aarão ( 2020) addressed the issue of what the contributions of online and face-to-face experiences should be in an ideal first year engineering mathematics blended learning experience. Developments trialled included online quizzes for changing attitudes and teaching foundational concepts, online lecture options in addition to face-to-face lectures, the adoption of what they called board tutorials (a technique that supports peer-to-peer learning and improves engagement), and learning outcomes supported by a problem-solving approach for more complex engineering modelling problems and online interactive problems. The individual student could determine the amount of blending. They found online quizzes to be a useful tool that, coupled with supporting material, can level the playing field in relation to the assumed knowledge for students transitioning to university. In addition, the use of online quizzes of foundational knowledge efficiently replaced a myriad of potential time consuming tutor-student conversations, such as diagnosis, feedback, independent work and the re-assessment, which would be impractical in a face-to-face environment. Quinn and Aarão also used board tutorials, changing the passive tutorials from 'mini-lectures', to experiences that both students and teachers valued highly. Quinn and Aarão argue that successful implementation of blended learning in first year mathematics occurs when one automates as many of the routine conversations between teacher and student as possible, and reserve what tutor-student interaction time you have for high-impact face-to-face learning activities such as board tutorials and for supporting project work.

The papers in this special issue that are mentioned in this section and centre on the design principles of scaling up professional development initiatives, show the needs that should be addressed by research. These needs focus on how to understand teacher change as a consequence of participating in MOOCS and blended learning initiatives.

3 Social networking and construction of knowledge

Social constructivist learning theory, as proposed and developed by Vygotsky, has long been seen to improve student engagement and learning, and many studies support this theory (Grady et al. 2012; Schmidt 2013). In their research on instructional technology, Pepin et al. ( 2017) found that many studies on the topic are predominantly framed by socio-cultural theories underlining the role of discourse in learning. The development of information and communication technologies has undergirded the emergence of new forms of discourse and has the potential to change social relations and the ways through which we come to understand the development of knowledge (Llinares and Olivero 2008; Llinares and Valls 2010; Clay et al. 2012). Interaction in online contexts allows us to consider the links between the processes of meaning construction and of participation underpinning learning. The links between construction of meaning and participation is scaffolded by social artefacts or tools, such as online collaboration, mind mapping or sharing narratives in online forums to discuss relevant aspects in mathematics teaching. Sharing interaction spaces, such as those that facilitate asynchronous1 online discussion, creates opportunities for participants to reorganise their knowledge in the course of the social interaction. In this sense, the affordance of new media helps participants to communicate knowledge in multimodal ways generating different ways of discourse.

Different theoretical perspectives about learning and knowledge have been used to understand the links between interaction in online contexts and the construction of knowledge to conceptualise technology-mediated interaction (Clay et al. 2012; Goos and Geiger 2012; Llinares and Valls 2010). Recently, new perspectives have emerged that consider how newly introduced media reorganise human thinking, favouring connections and group discussion (Borba et al. 2018). These approaches underline that media act and interact in knowing when participants interact collaboratively (in blended or online contexts). It is assumed that the nature of the interface between participants affects the potential for knowledge building (Borba and Llinares 2012). The notion of knowledge construction in collaborative settings assumes that the nature of participation and content of discourse is related to how the process of construction of knowledge is developed. One aspect here is the different forms of discourse that the participants adopt, and how participants create points of focus around a nexus that organises the negotiation of meanings. The media inserted in the specific online context can provide different ways of articulating the discourse for the participants to notice, represent, interpret or use theoretical elements. Two papers in this special issue focus their attention on different ways of articulating the discourse in collaborative contexts, namely, the construction of collaborative mind maps, and sharing and discussing narratives about teaching in an online forum. These two different types of discourse generated in collaborative online contexts focus the participants' attention on meanings, combining participation and reification processes. In these initiatives, several aspects of mathematics knowledge for teaching emerge, and mathematically significant pedagogical opportunities for mathematics teaching that builds on student thinking.

Cendros-Araujo and Gadanidis ( 2020) report on how the use of collaborative and multimodal technologies supports the construction of knowledge. The specific context is an undergraduate blended course in a primary teacher education programme in Canada, including the use of different tools for online collaborative mind mapping activities. The theoretical frame underlines the notion that new media reorganise human thinking. In this case mind maps are understood as ways of visualising mathematics education knowledge that is collectively constructed, and the different technological tools are used as means to support and organise topics, creating visual connections and inserting other different semiotic representations such as videos or images. The analysis of artefacts created by the prospective teachers (mind maps) and the flux of interaction during the construction process enabled Cendros-Araujo and Gadanidis to report on a grounded theory of knowledge building through mind mapping. They describe how pre-service mathematics teachers construct knowledge when they interact through online collaborative mind mapping and how the different technical characteristics of the tools impact on the reorganisation of knowledge by the different means of discourse. In this case the technological tools in a collaborative context allow new ways of knowing to be shown through a new type of discourse-such as integrating the visual and text, and combining graphical, narrative and symbolic realisations.

Fernandez, Llinares and Rojas ( 2020) report on the development of prospective secondary mathematics teachers' noticing as a consequence of sharing narratives of their own teaching in an asynchronous forum with other colleagues and university tutors. In this case, narratives of his/her own teaching are the artefacts that allow a prospective mathematics teacher to reify what is noticed on each occasion. The context is an online distance teacher education programme in Costa Rica aimed at developing the competence of prospective teachers to identify mathematically significant pedagogical opportunities (MOSTs) in order to build on student thinking. In this intervention, integration of thinking and doing is evident when prospective teachers reason about the teaching events in order to decide how to act. This paper shows two features of how online social interaction influences the development of teaching competence, such as noticing. The first feature is defined by the role of writing and sharing narratives in an online forum, and the second is defined by the role of feedback as a way of interactive collaboration. In this case, the development of noticing was related to aspects of discourse (communication processes) such as identifying MOSTs, providing more details of students' thinking and providing explicit reasons behind the prospective teachers' actions.

Both papers can be considered to be instances of how an online context, supporting the participants' interaction, helps to rearrange their own activity and, at the same time, as a way in which participants think and share their knowledge using certain technologies. These ideas are supported by the description of stages of knowledge building through mind mapping-introducing a topic, building a concept, and making sense of the whole picture-and by the ways in which the MOSTs are taken advantage of, and by the reasons given for the prospective teachers' actions. These ideas conform to the approach called humans-with-media, developed by Borba and Villarreal ( 2005). Furthermore, collaborative construction of mind mapping and sharing narratives of their own teaching can be seen as resources for thinking and communicating knowledge when participants are attempting to build new knowledge. The papers underline three relevant features, as follows. Firstly, how the media supporting social interaction can deploy several semiotic possibilities, giving forms to different types of discourse. Secondly, how sharing and co-creating tools generate the context in which participants can compare and share their ideas and justify and evaluate their arguments. Finally, the role played by cognitive scaffolding such as feedback from others and prompts to carry out the activities. These features help us to understand a little more about the relationships between social interaction in online environments and the knowledge construction and development of teaching competence.

4 Resources, tools and new learning environments: changing the relationships between mathematical knowledge, learners and teachers

In this special issue, several types of tools are analysed and discussed as they concern mathematics teaching and mathematics teacher education, showing new ways of thinking but also defining how we frame our activities as mathematics educators. Tools mediate the actions of mathematics educators, allowing us to design new learning environments, but this new context also determines new ways of thinking. There are several papers that focus on how using different types of tools determines changes in the relationships between mathematical knowledge and learners and teachers. Furthermore, the development of the new digital tools (or new uses of old tools) has generated the necessity of exploring innovative uses of digital technology.

The papers in Sect. 4.1 show three different approaches to digital tools: describing innovative practices; making explicit principles of design, and developing a new teaching stage. Innovative practices include using arts and digital technology to create virtual instruments with music software (Scucuglia) or the production of videos as a resource to produce meaning and to change the dynamics in classrooms, reported on by Oechsler and Borba. Another innovative practice is how students in mathematics courses can benefit by seeking assistance on the internet for help in solving their mathematical problems (Sanchez-Aguilar and Esparza Puga).

A second approach, as explored by the papers in Sect. 4.2, is to consider how new digital tools are framed by conceptual perspectives. In particular these perspectives influence the design of assessment tasks for computer based assessment to assess students' mathematical learning (Yerushalmy and Olsher), or they influence the production of tools such as video as resources to support teachers' professional learning, in which existing resources support teachers' professional learning (Bennison, Goos and Geiger). Finally, they illustrate how designing a new organisation of teaching supported by online access to video, shows that the typical lecture and homework elements of a course can be reversed in a flipped classroom environment (Voigt, Fredriksen and Rasmussen).

4.1 Tools, new ways of thinking and new practices

The new ways of using different digital tools portray a range of different teaching scenarios. The papers in this special issue consider the different meanings associated with the design and implementation of resources, tools and learning contexts, and changes in mathematics learning perspectives and the digital tools. The meanings associated with the notion of design and implementation of resources, tools and learning contexts, change mathematics learning perspectives; and the digital tools presented in different papers in this special issue show new ways of interaction between students, teachers and mathematical knowledge, defining new practices. Traditional tools, such as videos and assessment tasks, are used differently and define new practices. Furthermore, the accessibility of huge sources of information provided by the internet, generates new needs, such as how to determine criteria in looking for help to solve problems, or explicit conceptual frameworks to develop online resources to support teacher professional learning or to assess students' mathematical learning. There is also an increased need for students to think critically about the wealth of new opportunities associated with all the various resources with which they can interact, and how they can be empowered to develop this critical attitude towards evaluating new resources.

Scucuglia ( 2020) reports on the integrated use of the arts and digital technology in mathematics education creating pedagogic scenarios. In this case, the creation of a virtual instrument with music software is used for developing new ways of mathematics teaching. This approach generates new teaching scenarios that provide aesthetic mathematical experiences. The theoretical frame takes into account that mathematical knowledge is not produced by humans alone but by humans-with-media, in this case, analysing the pre-service teachers' mathematical experience when they are engaged in musical production. This new learning scenario underlines the link between music and mathematics education. The focus on the link between mathematics and music using digital tools opens possibilities for considering the hypothetical potential of thinking-with-media and music in terms of representation, patterning and algorithms, as aspects of computational thinking.

Oechsler and Borba ( 2020) investigated how the creation of videos with mathematical content, by the students themselves, may contribute to the process of changing the classroom, and how this activity can become a teaching and learning tool. They ground their discussion in social semiotics, a theory that considers the context of production and the negotiations between actors, to analyse how the production of videos in the classroom can help in the communication of mathematical knowledge and in the change of the dynamics in the classroom. They found that video production provided a classroom dynamic in which students could become protagonists of the teaching and learning process, with teachers mediating this activity. They argue that video production is a different way to express mathematics, and it is particularly well-suited to expressing what students have understood. Using videos, a new kind of mathematics can emerge in the classroom, integrating its traditional symbolic language with other modes, such as language, gesture, image and music. In production of the videos, students showed their understanding of the content, and through this activity, the students themselves became aware of their difficulties and sought ways to overcome them. In this sense, video production assists in encouraging students' discussion and reflection about content and its exposition to produce meaning and promotes a change in the dynamics of the classroom, breaking the barrier between the classroom and the outside world. This activity is seen as a new, emergent facet of education, in which the student searches for content outside the classroom.

Sánchez Aguilar and Puga ( 2020) used monitoring software to observe how a group of students use the internet to solve a mathematical task, whose mathematical underpinnings they are not completely familiar with, to produce a characterisation of the help-seeking behaviours that students display. They made use of self-reports, complemented with the analysis of students' solving of mathematics tasks, supported by the use of monitoring software. They found that students manifest instrumental help-seeking behaviours mostly associated with the procedural items of the task. A general pattern of behaviour, manifested by the students who participated in the study, was dominated by the use of search engines and keywords to identify sources of mathematical help. They observed how the internet and its resources were fundamental for some students to seek for help, and that, with this help, students were able to successfully solve a mathematical task on a topic partially unknown to them, which could be interpreted as a positive development of a self-regulated learning strategy. However, some students only used appropriate keywords to perform the help-seeking process-so students could find ways to solve mathematical tasks in which there was no need to exert a priori reasoning about the structure of the task or the nature of the mathematical situation at stake, before deciding on specific algorithmic procedures.

A common issue, considered by all three papers in this section, is the use of digital tools to emphasise a purposeful, jointly undertaken activity (creating virtual instruments with music software to underline mathematical thinking, videos with mathematical content, and using the internet to look for help). In these cases, the use of different types of tools shows how to create spaces for multiple voices in the learning environments, underlining the technological mediation played by the digital tools. These new uses of tools define new practices in mathematics education.

4.2 Developing new tools

The design of digital tools has generated the necessity to make the conceptual framing underpinning their development more explicit. The development of new tools strengthens the growth of this field, linking the quality of available resources and learning. This is the focus in papers in this issue by Bennison, Goos and Geiger, and by Yerushalmy and Olscher. Bennison and colleagues report on a research-informed instructional design approach to developing an online resource to support teacher professional learning. This approach provides a framework to determine the utility of existing resources and identify new needs, and also a conceptual framework to inform the development of new sets of videos. The specific focus is how video resources targeting specific teacher learning needs can be designed and made available via open access online.

Yerushalmy and Olscher report on a study concerning a special kind of task for assessing students' reasoning skills when establishing the validity of geometry statements about the similarity of triangles. By creating examples, students have to verify claims that argue for conjunction or disjunction of given relations. They focus on characterising the properties of the conjunction/disjunction design for automatically assessing conceptions related to examples generated by the learner with interactive diagrams. Their analysis shows that the Seeing the Entire Picture (STEP) environment, which supports interactive example eliciting tasks, and the design principles of conjunction and disjunction of geometric relations, enabled them to assess the students' exploration of the logic of universal claims, characterise successful and partial answers, and differentiate between students. By analysing the student-generated example spaces, they explored the opportunities of the environment and the specific task design pattern to automatically provide feedback and assess students' mathematical skills based on logical relations between examples and universal statements.

The papers of Bennison, Goos and Geiger ( 2020), and Yerushalmy and Olsher ( 2020) show how mathematics educators should take into account the conceptual frame underpinning the design of new digital tools (to provide opportunities for teacher professional learning and to asses students' mathematical learning). Explicit principles of design to develop tools (and determine ways of using them), is a growing field in mathematics teacher education (Van Es et al. 2020) and teaching mathematics (Leung and Baccaglini-Frank 2017).

4.3 New ways of teaching: flipped classrooms

The idea of a flipped classroom, where students watch earlier prepared lectures outside the classroom, has recently become quite popular in blended learning (Schmidt 2013).

In this pedagogical model, students completed preparatory activities (e.g., readings and reflections) before class and then participated in collaborative activities in class. (Crouch and Mazur 2001).

The flipped classroom approach in mathematics education is related to increasing in-class time for task/practice, the possibility of integrating new knowledge with existing beliefs and real-time feedback. But challenges are also reported, such as students' unfamiliarity with flipped learning, and significant start-up effort on the part of instructors (Lo et al. 2017).

5 Implications for future directions

In 2016, Borba et al. ( 2016) identified five trends of development in e-learning in mathematics education that need to be addressed:

1. 1.
The relationship between students and mathematics created by student access to mobile technologies disrupts the traditional flow of mathematics knowledge from teacher to student, and that is not well understood from a research perspective.

2. 2.
The role of MOOCs, disrupting the institutional and hierarchical nature of traditional education is not well understood.

3. 3.
The availability of online mathematics learning resources means that many students now turn to these resources before they consult a teacher or a textbook, raising questions about how the resources are facilitated to foster conceptual understanding.

4. 4.
Current technologies, such as social media, provide extensive collaborative and social networking affordances. This raises questions about the design and use of LMSs and personal learning environments.

5. 5.
Teachers are still uncertain about the amount and nature of blending in blended learning courses and how to employ a flipped classroom model to make the classroom a place for extension and elaboration rather than direct instruction.

Although some of the issues in these trends are being addressed, the questions are still very much open. From the surveyed literature, it is becoming increasingly clear that more empirical evidence is needed to determine the effectiveness of online or blended instruction in classrooms at all levels of mathematics education and how the use of digital tools determines new practices.

The nature of mathematics is also changing. With computing devices that can do the procedural mathematics faster and more accurately than humans, there is a shift from seeing mathematics as an application of procedures to an emphasis on creative problem solving (Devlin 2011).

Along with the trends mentioned above, we identify four domains that help us to see changes caused by the use of the internet: the changing classrooms; new ways of thinking and human-with-media; collaboration in online contexts, and hyper-personalisation of learning.

5.1 The changing classroom

Singh ( 2018) related a story of a mathematics teacher who used to give out "insanely hard" mathematics problems. He encouraged students to get help from any teacher in or outside the school, but excluding himself. His main objective was not really to get students to arrive at the correct answer or solution-he wanted to initiate mathematics conversations outside the classroom. He wanted people talking about mathematics. His ideas are central to the new approach of expanding the classroom outside the boundaries that we are used to.

The physical classroom, as we know it, is changing. Menninger ( 2011) encouraged educators to seriously consider and discuss the changes needed in the classroom. He wanted educators to regard teaching as a work of art, in that.

...a total work of art serves not only as an all encompassing intellectual, emotional, and spiritual experience, but also as a means of conceptualizing the act of teaching itself; instruction should inspire while it informs, just as art informs as it inspires. (p. 97)

Many current initiatives take a technology push approach in which learning content is pushed onto a group of students in a closed environment in a one-size-fits-all, centralised, static, top-down, and knowledge-push as in models of traditional learning. Researchers who feel a shift towards a more open student-pull model for learning are needed-a shift towards a more personalised, social, open, dynamic, and knowledge-pull model (Borba et al. 2016). Chatti et al. ( 2010) suggested the 3P learning model, consisting of three core components, namely, personalisation, participation, and knowledge-pull, as a new approach for addressing the growing complexity and constant change in knowledge that is required for the new generation.

The hyper-connected students of today live in a world of instant interpersonal communication and unlimited access to information and educational resources (Christen 2009). To an extent, this networked world, and the powerful learning tools it offers, has started to penetrate the typical classroom. Schools should take full advantage of the twenty-first century learning technologies. We are entering an educational transformation that aligns the learning with the learners themselves and the employment that awaits them after they leave school.

We may think that few people still believe that 'the role of the teacher is to transmit information'. However, many teachers-with-blackboard, or teachers-with-power-point are still considering themselves as information transmitters. Almost parallel to this issue, at the end of last century there was a heated debate about distance versus face-to-face education. As many researchers predicted, it now looks as if a blended, changing classroom is taking shape. Whether one calls it face-to-face, blended or distance, it almost always is a blended experience, in which on the one hand, students who are in a traditional classroom use internet and mobile technology constantly, and in which on the other hand, almost every distance education course has some face-to-face components.

As argued by Souto and Borba ( 2018), the internet has become the main source of transmitting information, changing traditional classrooms. The role of teachers, and of the community (face-to-face and virtual) is to build knowledge and propose new problems that have not already been solved on the internet. Together with these approaches, we still have (and it seems necessary) to have traditional instruction in many instances. Different ways of communicating mathematical ideas transform the production of knowledge, and it seems likely that the classroom (as we currently know it) will not fit in future education systems. The papers in this issue are instances of how the meaning of the classroom is changing in mathematics teaching as well as mathematics teacher education.

5.2 New ways of thinking and humans-with-media

In Vygotsky's theory, social interaction with others plays the primary role in the construction of learning-interaction with adults/teachers but also with peers. This interplay enables the student to move to higher levels of understanding and achievement (Blatchford et al. 2003).

The traditional online learning environment was first viewed with some skepticism and expected to be less effective at developing higher cognitive thinking processes than traditional classroom learning (Chaney 2016; Cicconi 2014). However, with the currently available features, blended learning incorporates the social aspect more fully through the presence of many other students, teachers and online resources. Chaney ( 2016) suggested that in blended learning the combination of a human teacher with online resources provides an effective way for students to construct learning socially (Chaney 2016). Researchers suggested that online blended learning fits well with Vygotsky's concept of a zone of proximal development despite challenges that arise (Cicconi 2014; Deulen 2013).

There is a growing relationship between humans and media, as originally proposed more than twenty years ago. Some authors have claimed that artefacts shape the human mind, but Borba and Villarreal ( 2005) documented that things happen the other way around as well: humans shape technology beyond the design of tools and of digital tools. Besides, technology is seen as having agency. Digital technology is saturated with humanity in its design and in its conception, and humans are impregnated by technology, and in particular digital technology.

Souto and Borba ( 2018) showed examples of how the third generation of activity theory may be transformed by the notion of humans-with-media as agents of production of knowledge. From the theoretical perspective of human capital and activity theory (Souto and Borba 2018), artefacts, community, and subjects are separate vertices of the multiple triangle diagram that illustrates activity in a social approach. Souto and Borba ( 2018) show examples of the internet being community and subject. The notion of humans-with-media, which has as one of three pillars the first generation of activity theory, with the notion of reorganisation of thinking (Tikhomirov 1981), may now transform the current, and more thorough third generation of activity theory.

5.3 Collaboration in online contexts

Collaboration in learning is becoming increasingly possible and popular in new teaching and learning contexts from the internet, and takes place in different formats. The concept of personal learning environments (PLE) was introduced through the work of, e.g., Attwell ( 2007), Chatti et al. ( 2010) and Wild et al. ( 2010). PLEs are systems that enable students to take control of their own learning, setting their own learning objectives, and managing their own learning content to achieve these learning objectives (Borba et al. 2016). A PLE can consist of subsystems, such as a desktop application or some web-based service integrating formal and informal learning, using social networks, and could include collaboration possibilities, such as small groups, to connect a range of resources and systems in an individual space.

PLEs differ from learning management systems (LMS) in that the LMS is course-wide (or institution-wide), while a PLE is individual. When students do not have control over what is taught but do have control over what is learnt (Tu et al. 2012), they create a PLE, a collection of all tools they use for learning, thereby enabling a student-controlled integration of myriad learning tools and services into a personalised space (Bidarra and Araújo 2013). The idea of a personal learning network (PLN) is related to the concept of a PLE. PLNs extend the PLE framework to include an informal learning network of people with whom to connect for the specific purpose of learning (Borba et al. 2016). In a PLN there is an understanding among participants that they are connecting for the purpose of active learning (Lalonde 2012). Although these environments are not commonly used in mathematics education yet, they are well-known concepts in other disciplines, such as computer science. It is envisaged that, in the foreseeable future, an increasing number of students and institutions will embark on this route of collaborating online to support their learning.

The issues regarding collaboration in online contexts in the papers of this issue underline some of the latter features, including, in particular, how the media supporting social interaction deploy several forms of semiotic possibilities. Also, they underline how features of participants in interactions, such as justifying their positions and evaluating their arguments, are intermingled with the cognitive scaffolding that is more difficult to identify in traditional teaching settings.

5.4 Hyper-personalisation of learning

Students no longer recite their lessons in chorus as they did years ago, but we are still far from a really personalised educational system (Paludan 2006). Despite our awareness of a disparity between students, the normal practice is to lump learners together by date of birth. Today, unique, personal characteristics such as creativity, a sense of humour, and special competencies are recognised as important in education (Paludan 2006). Learning can be enhanced when the instructional process accommodates the various learning styles of students (Lin et al. 2017).

New teaching contexts, with the use of the internet, offer every student a personalised approach to learning where they control their own pacing and where they can see themselves as successful students (Staker 2011). In fact, some authors are of the opinion that students should be allowed to choose their own learning pathways (Chaney 2017).

[They] are able to select learning formats to fit their changing needs...It is not the role of the teacher to prescribe the nature of the blend. (George-Walker and Keeffe 2010, p. 12)

The idea of hyper-personalisation has become quite popular in internet marketing. Adaptive hypermedia aims to enhance the functionality of hyperlink-based systems by making the user interaction process personalisable (Brusilovsky et al. 1998a). Adaptive hypermedia is an alternative to the traditional 'one-size-fits-all' approach in the development of hypermedia systems, in that they build a model of the goals, preferences and knowledge of each individual user and this model is used throughout the interaction with the user in order to adapt to the needs of that particular user (Brusilovsky 1996; Kurilovas 2016). In a learning situation, a student in an adaptive educational hypermedia system could be given a presentation that is adapted specifically to his or her knowledge of the topic (Hothi et al. 2000) and the most relevant links to proceed further will be suggested (Brusilovsky et al. 1998b; Kavcic 2004).

Mohan ( 2013) predicted that the future of all student education-from kindergarten to post-graduate level-will be hyper-personalised. Each student will focus on having their own teacher, their own curriculum and their own books or other resources. In such an environment, the teacher, using adaptive hypermedia, will increasingly become a person who understands the unique needs of each student. Not all students in a class will be at the same level. Some might surge ahead in mathematics while others in literature or art. It will help students to excel in something, rather than be ordinary at everything (Mohan 2013).

5.5 Panic-gogy

The arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 forced universities and schools to move to online teaching instead of the traditional face-to-face approach, and this is likely to continue for the indefinite future (Han 2020). This situation makes online and blended learning an essential topic in the teaching of mathematics and other disciplines. If nothing else, the worldwide lockdown has given us a glimpse into the future-a future of remote workspaces, online interactions and digital service delivery. More and more people may be working or studying from home using online educational and meeting platforms, replacing existing processes with digital equivalents, ramping up measurement instruments on websites, interaction on social media, and marketing activities. E-learning is becoming popular worldwide. As a result of the pandemic, blended and online learning has developed from important to essential.

Teachers all over the world have a tongue-in-cheek name for what everybody is forced to do now: Panic-gogy-for panic + pedagogy (Kamanetz 2020).

Panic-gogy means understanding students' practical resources and problems, including availability of devices and the internet, family responsibilities, students sent home who need to find a new place to live, and financial constraints. But it also means how teachers are going to move into this environment with their teaching approaches.

Many teachers do not have the same experience of online instruction as they have of face-to-face teaching and all of a sudden there are many 'experts' giving advice on how an online approach should be employed. Teachers encounter new problems and feel somewhat isolated and uncomfortable in the environment. Teachers are uncertain about the level of students' commitment to learning.

One does get the feeling that, as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, in many instances, institutions move over to using technology without really making use of the existing available research on the topic. Granted, COVID-19 has forced institutions into using technology without the luxury of time to consider research or best practice-they are running crisis management to survive. Moreover, some instititutions use this opportunity to profit from the situation, saving on their face-to-face activities.

Most of us agree that teaching should be student-centred: "Teaching should not be based on what knowledge the professors can impart, but instead on what students need" (Han 2020). But when one suddenly has to transfer to an entirely new teaching environment, many teachers tend to just convert their traditional courses to an online platform. We have labelled that a "domestication of a new media": one does not take advantage of the agency of a new medium and simply uses practices from teaching with the old medium (Borba and Villarreal 2005).

I think the first thing is, we are not building online courses or converting your face to face courses to online learning. Really, what we're doing is we are trying to extend a sense of care to our students and trying to build a community that's going to be able to work together to get through the learning challenges that we have. .... so if people think that in three to five days they're going to rejigger their course and build some super amazing online platform, that's probably unlikely to happen. (DeRosa in Kamanetz 2020).

In many countries, there are also digital divides and social inequalities that have to be taken into account. There are many students (and teachers) who do not have access to technology and connectivity.

In the COVID-19 context where social distancing is encouraged, it will be essential to pay even more attention to the human connection and to find ways to ensure that human interaction is continued.

This special issue shows parts of this transformation that are happening in regular education, pre-service and in-service teacher education.

6 Conclusions

It is generally accepted that we do not need a formal 'curriculum' to explicitly teach a young child to speak. An environment permeated by orality seems a friendly one for a small child to try a word, to repeat, and to interiorise and create or construct new sentences.

The classic philosopher Pierre Levy (Levy 1993) discussed the different levels of orality. In current terminology, we can connect his ideas to the multimodal discourse (Bezemer et al. 2016) that is generated by digital videos, LMSs, and most discourses that are products of collectives of humans-with-media, including computers. Borba and Villarreal ( 2005) claimed that expressions made by collectives that include computers, may be part of an orality at a next level.

In this phase of technological development, communication that involves different computer platforms, e.g. LMS and social media, is a combination of icons, videos, regular writing, orality, images, graphs and video-clips that seems to bring a new consequence to mathematics education.

Traditionally, education used to be very much teacher driven. However, over the last decades, the focus has been changing from a situation of students passively absorbing information from an educator who is teaching by writing on the blackboard-sometimes referred to as pushing knowledge-to a more student driven approach, where students take control of the learning process-referred to as a pull process (Bassendowski and Petrucka 2013). This approach encourages students to select and transform information, discover principles, make hypotheses and decisions beyond the given information (Jung and Latchem 2009). Students can become involved in the design and development as well as the delivery of curricula (Lightner et al. 2007). An environment that supports the development of communities and collaborative discussion opportunities can assist students to comprehend and synthesise information, as independent and critical thinkers (Jansen et al. 2011).

In the traditional push approach the idea is that only the educator has legitimate knowledge and this knowledge is being transmitted one-way to students. A pull model involves the interest and commitment of students to create communities of trust, knowledge sharing, cooperation, and collaboration (Bassendowski and Petrucka 2013) as some papers in this special issue show. Pull approaches are characterised by constructivist and connectivist models-some of which are created by students, as in socially shared environments (Willems 2009). In these models students demand, request, and even create the particular products or information that they need. Students become active participants in their learning by working alongside the educators in both traditional and online settings (Ahn and Class 2011; Willems 2009).

A message throughout our entire paper is that the official 'curriculum' is currently playing a role that is overemphasised. Our modern students want a bigger say in how they are taught and what they are taught. Comparable to a child learning to speak, they want to decide on what mathematics they learn and how, in a pull approach, rather than a curriculum that is pushed onto them by the educational system. We may be at the beginning of a transformation of the classroom. Will mathematics change in the same way that it changed with the appearance of 'paper and pencil'? However, although the papers in this issue push the field forward, there are still many issues to address.

A wide array of media and technology is available to create new hybrid forms of teaching. The integration of technology enables educators to create learning experiences that actively and meaningfully pull students into course content. This technology may form thinking collectives (Levy 1993) with teachers that can break the walls of the regular 'cubic' classroom that is associated with lecturing.

Questions arise considering the new social interactions, the design of new teaching settings and about the new ways of thinking in the use of digital tools. Some of these questions are as follows:

What technology should students use to support their own learning as well as collaboratively the learning from other students?

How do we provide ways for students to evaluate and reflect critically about the learning and the resources with which they interact?

How can mathematics educators develop research-based principles of design regarding new teaching contexts that digital tools provide?

How can social media tools be combined with the best practices in teaching and contribute effectively to student engagement?

Papers in general, and survey papers in particular, age rapidly when the theme is digital technology (and mathematics education). New trends in mathematics education, and as we emphasise in this paper, changes in the (mathematics) classroom itself and the speed of digital technology may accelerate this 'deterioration' of the paper. With the COVID-19 crisis this may be an even bigger problem. Once this paper is published, or when it reaches a given reader, the COVID-19 problem may have been resolved with an appropriate vaccine and/or treatment for those infected, or we may still be at the stage we are now, with many airports, borders and frontiers closed, or we may be in a 'cloudy scenario', with some activities being resumed, but with everyone using masks and avoiding shaking hands and bodily contact.

The question is, what has this to do with mathematics education and digital technology? Besides the impact on conferences and on the transforming of mathematics classrooms, we may have to ask broader questions:

Digital technology intensified travelling and our way of living, so it is also partly responsible for the present crisis. Is it possible that the use of digital technology can generate a similar crisis in mathematics education?

Conversely, if the crisis lasts for a long period, would digital technologies be able to provide alternative ways to implement mathematics education?

There is not much research on online mathematics education for young children, but if the crisis lasts for a long time, are we going to implement it without sufficient research? If the current crisis is over soon, are we going to develop research on mathematics education for a possible 'COVID-2X' crisis?

In this paper, among others, we have anthropomorphised media, talking about agency. The notion of humans-with-media as the collective that produces knowledge, may synthesise it, as we discussed in this paper. The COVID-19 virus (SARS-CoV-2) is a non-living being: can we talk about the impact (agency) of COVID-19 on mathematics education and on the world?

These questions are too broad for this paper, and along with other questions will be the theme of other papers. We hope to be there to write and to read them!

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Authors and Affiliations

1. University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

Johann Engelbrecht

2. Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, Spain

Salvador Llinares

3. UNESP, Rio Claro, Brazil

Marcelo C. Borba

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Johann Engelbrecht.

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Special issue of ZDM Mathematics Education (2020, Nº 5 September) " Online mathematics education and e-learning ".

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Engelbrecht, J., Llinares, S. & Borba, M.C. Transformation of the mathematics classroom with the internet. ZDM Mathematics Education 52, 825-841 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-020-01176-4
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Transformation of the mathematics classroom with the internet - ZDM - Mathematics Education

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Growing use of the internet in educational contexts has been prominent in recent years. In this survey paper, we describe how the internet is transforming the mathematics classroom and mathematics teacher education. We use as references several reviews of use of the internet in mathematics education settings made in recent years to determine how the field has evolved.

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Integration of computational thinking in K-12 mathematics education: a systematic review on CT-based mathematics instruction and student learning

Abstract

There has been substantial research undertaken on the integration of computational thinking (CT) in K-12 mathematics education in recent years, particularly since 2018 when relevant systematic reviews were conducted on the topic. Many empirical studies in this area have yet to elaborate clearly and explicitly on how CT may support mathematics learning, or otherwise, in CT-based mathematics activities. Addressing this research gap, we conducted a systematic review on the integration of CT in K-12 mathematics education with a focus on CT-based mathematics instruction and students learning under such instruction. The Web of Science database was searched for in terms of studies published from 2006 to 2021, from which 24 articles were selected to provide illustrations of CT-based mathematics instruction and related student learning, and they were further analyzed according to education levels and contexts, programming tools, learning outcomes in CT and mathematics, and the mutual relationship between CT and mathematics learning. Among the results, this review found that geometrized programming and student-centered instructional approaches were facilitators of productive learning in CT and mathematics. Moreover, CT-based mathematics learning entails an interactive and cyclical process of reasoning mathematically and reasoning computationally, which can occur when: (1) applying mathematics to construct CT artefacts; (2) applying mathematics to anticipate and interpret CT outputs; and (3) generating new mathematical knowledge in parallel with the development of CT. The findings contribute to an in-depth understanding of what, and how, CT-based mathematics instruction impacts student learning in K-12 contexts.

Introduction

In the last two decades, considerable literature has grown around the theme of computational thinking (CT), namely, "the thought processes involved in formulating problems and their solutions, so that the solutions are represented in a form that can be effectively carried out by an information-processing agent" (Wing, 2011, p. 20). First to coin the term, Wing ( 2006, 2008) emphasized that CT is a fundamental skill required in daily life and a kind of analytical thinking that shares close connections with mathematical thinking, engineering and scientific practices. Research on CT has received increasing attention, especially regarding its integration into K-12 educational contexts (e.g., Feldhausen et al., 2018; Jocius et al., 2021; Sırakaya et al., 2020; Swaid, 2015). One kind of such integration that has obvious connection, yet little is known about, is CT's integration in mathematics instruction and its associated learning outcomes (e.g., Barr & Stephenson, 2011; Sneider et al., 2014; Weintrop et al., 2016).

Using CT and programming tools to learn mathematics can be traced back to Papert's Logo programming ( 1980) and further developed by Weintrop et al. ( 2016), who illustrate the resemblance of CT practices and those of science and mathematics practices, i.e., data handling, modelling and simulation, computational problem-solving, and systems thinking. With CT-based mathematics instructional approaches becoming more widely adopted in K-12 contexts in recent years (e.g., Miller, 2019; Pei et al., 2018; Shumway et al., 2021), a number of design-based research have been conducted to improve the conceptual basis and practice of a "computationally enhanced mathematics education" (Ng & Cui, 2021, p. 848). Related studies have also advanced the instructional design, including the programming tasks to facilitate students' mathematics learning. These studies encompass Kotsopoulos et al.'s ( 2017) pedagogical framework for CT activities, designing for unplugged, tinkering, making, remixing in K-12 mathematical problem-solving in the domains of combinatorics (e.g., De Chenne & Lockwood, 2022), algebra (Bråting & Kilhamn, 2021), number theory and mathematical modelling (e.g., Ng & Cui, 2021) and geometry (e.g., Miller, 2019). Significantly, these studies evidence the reciprocal relationship between computer science and mathematical concepts, in the sense that the application of CT deepens mathematical disciplinary knowledge, while the context of CT-based mathematics learning improves one's CT skills (Pei et al., 2018). However, as argued by Lockwood and De Chenne ( 2020), while programming seems to be effective in learning certain mathematical topics, it cannot be concluded that it would be superior to paper-and-pencil, nor that all domains of mathematics are generally suitable for integration with computing. In addition, students were found to experience various challenges due to potential differences between the two types of thinking (i.e., computational and mathematical) when solving mathematical problems in programming contexts (Cui & Ng, 2021). Thus, there remains a lack of consensus in the interrelationship and components of overlap between CT and mathematics, especially surrounding the K-12 education contexts in which strong emphasis has been placed on CT development in age-appropriate and interdisciplinary ways (Hong Kong Curriculum Development Council, 2020; International Society for Technology in Education, 2016; National Research Council, 2013). An important question to be further explored is to clarify how computing can be effectively used to foster K-12 mathematics thinking and learning (Hickmott et al., 2018), and vice versa.

While existing reviews have explored the multi-faceted linkage of CT and K-12 education (Barcelos et al., 2018; Grover & Pea, 2013; Hickmott et al., 2018; Hsu et al., 2018; Tang et al., 2020), a scarcity of reviews has discussed the linkage or interplay between CT and K-12 mathematics thinking and learning (Shumway et al., 2021). The most recent and relevant review was conducted by Hickmott et al. ( 2018), which was a scoping review of how CT has been applied in K-12 mathematics classrooms broadly. The categories of analyses were mainly descriptive, including implicit or explicit connections to domains of mathematics, activity approaches, and evidence of impact on student learning (by quantitative methods of studies). Hickmott et al. ( 2018) highlighted the need for "studies that explicitly linked the learning of mathematics concepts with computational thinking were uncommon in the reviewed literature" (p. 65). In response, this paper aims to provide an in-depth examination of extant studies of K-12 practices that explicitly link CT with mathematics thinking and learning. In this way, we contribute toward understanding and synthesizing the interplay between CT and mathematics learning as evident in empirical studies, especially given the vast number of studies that have been published since Hickmott et al.'s ( 2018) review.

In this paper, we report on a systematic review with the dual purpose of reviewing broadly the characteristics of CT-based mathematics instruction and student learning under such environment, and then provide an in-depth analysis and discussion of the interplay between CT and mathematics learning outcomes from extant empirical studies. To do so, we conducted a review of studies that detail both teaching and learning processes in CT-based mathematics activities. It addresses the research gap regarding the impact of CT-based mathematics instruction on student learning, and also more clearly and explicitly identify the interplay between CT and mathematics learning. To achieve our dual foci, we pose the following four research questions (RQs):

1. 1.
In what educational contexts is CT integrated in K-12 mathematics education?

2. 2.
What tools and instructional approaches are used in CT-based mathematics activities?

3. 3.
What theoretical constructs or conceptual frameworks have been used, and what students' learning outcomes are characterized in CT-based mathematics activities?

4. 4.
What kinds of interplay between CT and mathematics thinking and learning are observed?

Methodology

We used the PRISMA systematic review method (Page et al., 2021a, b) to review the impact of CT-based mathematics instruction on student learning. In what follows, we describe the search process, selection process and method of data analysis.

Search process

The Web of Science (WOS) database was used as the source for literature search. We used "computational thinking" AND "math*" AND ("school*" OR "educat*") AND ("primary" OR "elementary" OR "secondary" OR "middle" OR "high" OR "K-12") as the search terms to search in "topic", which included searching in titles, abstracts, author keywords, and keywords plus. In consistent with other systematic reviews on CT (Barcelos et al., 2018; Hsu et al., 2018), we limited our search to the publication date starting from 2006, when Jeannette Wing first introduced the term CT; as such, the date range of the publications searched was between 2006-01-01 and the date we performed the search, i.e., 2021-11-15. With WOS automatically removing duplicate articles, we obtained 290 articles in total for further screening.

Selection process

The overall goal of the selection process was to improve relevance of the searched articles as pertaining to the goals of the current review. Our selection process consisted of three stages, and the procedures are summarized in Fig. 1. In the following, we discuss each stage in detail.

At Stage 1, non-English articles and non-journal articles (e.g., Conference Papers/Abstract/Unpublished papers) were removed to ensure language accessibility and quality of research of the literature pool, resulting in 164 remaining papers. We excluded unpublished articles because of the need for peer review to ensure quality. Consistent with similar review (Tang et al., 2020), our decision to exclude conference papers and abstract was based on the following reasons: (a) according to Bradford's Law (Testa, 2009), the majority of noteworthy scientific findings have been disclosed in journal articles. Conference papers in this situation would present findings that were similar to those in journal publications. (b) Our systematic review aimed to examine detailed teaching process or student learning process. In general, conference papers did not report such information due to the limited space.

In the next two stages, we developed screening criteria as aligned with our research purpose to investigate the integration of CT in K-12 mathematics education. Although we included keywords of "K-12", "CT", and "math" in the search terms, there was no guarantee that the search records were relevant to those terms, as we only limited the search in titles, abstracts, and keywords. Therefore, at Stage 2, we further reviewed the title, abstract, and full text (when necessary) holistically to eliminate studies that were not conducted in K-12 contexts (e.g., at collegiate levels) or were not focused on CT and/or mathematics education. For example, some articles only mentioned the term "STEM (Science, Technology, Engineer and Mathematics)", "mathematics", or "CT" in the abstracts, but the primary focus of the studies was neither CT-related nor mathematics education-related, i.e., these articles are not about the teaching, learning, and affect issues of CT and mathematics. After the screening of this stage, we removed 111 articles, and the remaining 53 articles entered the full-text screening at the next stage.

At Stage 3, we aimed to screen for those studies that provide adequate descriptions of the teaching and learning processes to shed light on the relationship between CT-based mathematics instruction and student learning outcomes in CT and mathematics. First, the articles must report on empirical studies, so that the quality of student learning with reference to the instructional design can be empirically investigated. As such, we excluded theoretical papers, reviews, and articles that described provisional activities without implementation. Second, we identified studies that analyzed student learning processes and outcomes upon engaging in some form of CT-based mathematics instruction. This means we excluded studies that did not offer insight into features of student learning, such as research focusing only on teachers' learning (e.g., Bouck et al., 2021), and articles that only described the process of implementation or design of a course, task, or learning program, without explicitly reporting on student learning (e.g., Matsumoto & Cao, 2017). Regarding the third and final criterion, we continued to determine whether the article explicitly described any features of the CT-based mathematics instructional process (e.g., tools, tasks, instructional approaches); this inclusion criterion directly relates to our research questions. The first author and the second author independently conducted screening against these criteria. For discrepant screening results, the authors discussed each one until mutual agreement. This screening stage was concluded with 24 articles that constituted the final collection of review articles.

Data analysis

Although our research questions seem to be more inclined to retain the studies using qualitative research methods, the numerical results (Fig. 2, left) does not show significant difference in the use of the three research methods (qualitative at 42%, quantitative at 33%, mix method at 25%). We further categorized the data collection methods (Fig. 2, right) and found that observation and test are the two most frequent ways for assessing and having access to student learning.

Upon completion of the screening process, the first and the third author initially proposed a set of codes which addressed the RQs upon their reading of the 24 articles. For example, in response to answer RQ1 (educational context), the deductive codes included education level (grade), educational setting (school education or after-school activity), and disciplinary context (multidisciplinary or CT-based mathematics context). Likewise, in response to RQ2 and RQ3, the authors prescribed codes that addressed the programming tools and instructional approach adopted, as well as learning outcomes (associated with CT or mathematics).

To arrive at the second- and third-level codes, the first and third author performed constant comparative analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) to identify and refine the codes that adequately describe the methods and results highlighted in the empirical studies until saturation of categories. Specifically, the authors independently coded six of the articles (or 25% of the selected articles) and discussed the coding results to (1) operationalize the meaning of each code; and (2) delete, add, and synthesize coding items that were helpful to answer the RQs. This process yielded the second- and third-level codes, and a finalized coding scheme with code definitions as presented in Table 1. In the case of RQ4, the authors used constant comparative analysis (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) to obtain new findings regarding the interplay between CT and mathematics. Open coding was first used to create initial codes by extracting information from the literature that was pertinent to student learning. Then, the authors practiced axial coding and selective coding to create a core category to connect them and achieved the final codes.

Upon completion of the coding scheme, the authors coded another eight articles independently, and the inter-rater agreement exceeded 90%. At last, the first author coded all the remaining articles, and when encountering uncertain coding, all authors discussed until agreement. We report on the coding results in the next section.

Result

In this section, we first describe the educational context, where CT-based mathematics teaching and learning activities are implemented (section " Educational context of CT-based mathematics instruction"); this includes reporting on the education level, educational setting, and disciplinary context of the reviewed studies. Then, we discuss the pedagogical aspects of the articles (section " Pedagogical aspects of CT-based mathematics instruction"), which include the tools and instructional approaches used during CT-based mathematics instruction. Finally, we review students' learning outcomes in relation to CT and mathematics (section " Interplay between CT and mathematics learning outcomes"), both in terms of the diverse constructs used to characterize student learning, as well as the interplay between CT and mathematics learning outcomes as evident in the reviewed literature. We discuss the results along with our further insights in each sub-section.

Educational context of CT-based mathematics instruction

To begin, we use Fig. 3 to summarize the literature count regarding the education level in which the studies are conducted. Notably, more researchers have carried out studies in primary educational contexts, followed by lower secondary education. This may be related to researchers' attention to the importance of students' early exposure to CT (Jurado et al., 2020; Sáez-López et al., 2019) alongside the emergence of child-friendly programming tools for easy CT experimentation during a critical cognitive developmental period for CT learning (Rodríguez-Martínez et al., 2020). Among the 24 reviewed articles, five included research participants across education levels; these studies highlight the feasibility of conducting CT-based mathematics activities to students with varying knowledge bases and skill levels. The cross-grade activities used among these studies are afforded by the spiral mathematics curricula across K-12 education, such as the recurrent arithmetic topics in kindergarten and lower primary education (Sung et al., 2017), the relevant transition from arithmetic to algebraic thinking in the middle school grades (Ng & Cui, 2021), and the interrelated 2D geometry topics across secondary education (Wilkerson-Jerde, 2014). In addition, these studies commonly provided an open-ended constructionist learning environment which involved the students creating CT artefacts with little direct instruction (Papert & Harel, 1991), during which the students could explore and develop non-prescribed learning outcomes in both mathematics and CT. As argued by Muñoz et al. ( 2020) and Ng et al. ( 2021), CT-based mathematics activities are suitable for cross-grade teaching and learning, because they support non-traditional curricula learning, with the former study showing that mathematics learning could take on a range of domains with little prior mathematics knowledge necessary, and the latter study concluding that the developmental sequence of learning mathematics maybe altered by the use of computational tools. In particular, Ng et al. ( 2021) highlights the conceptual connection between skip counting and geometric sequences, which takes roughly 7 years to learn in traditional curricula; but in the Scratch programming environment, it is as straightforward as replacing the symbol for operation. In summary, we synthesize from the reviewed studies the potential for CT-based mathematics instruction to achieve cross-grades mathematics learning. At the same time, they also stimulate questions regarding the constraints of disciplinary mathematics learning within a highly structured curricula which is predominantly intended for using paper-and-pencil as the medium of learning. As such, we also draw attention to the constraints of research and practice in CT-based mathematics instruction given the current curricula structure.

As part of educational context, we analyzed the educational settings to understand whether CT-based mathematics instruction has been applied in formal or informal education, with the former being compulsory and the latter being voluntary. We found that 17 reviewed studies were conducted within a formal schooling environment, and 7 studies were conducted outside of formal education settings (of which 4 were in primary education and 3 were in secondary education). In particular, the 7 studies were contextualized in after-school programs or summer camps, which are also considered as non-formal education, since they are intentional and structured when compared to spontaneous and unstructured activities in daily informal settings (Eshach, 2007). We also investigated the disciplinary context of CT-based mathematics instructions to examine whether a single or multiple disciplines were involved in the learning activities. We found that a minority of studies ( n = 7) aimed to develop or support students' CT and mathematics learning in an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary way (e.g., STEM, STEAM, Math + Science). For example, the study of Gilchrist et al. ( 2021) was situated in a pandemic awareness STEM outreach curriculum focused on medicine, mathematics and technology, where students developed an epidemic outbreak simulator using the Python programming with CoCalc. In another study, students were asked to use KIBO robots to solve STEAM-related problems in designing and engineering a real-life artefact (Jurado et al., 2020).

The remaining 17 articles reported on students' CT and mathematics learning in the context of solving CT-based mathematical problems (see more discussion in section " Interplay between CT and mathematics learning outcomes"). For example, Wilerson-Jerde (2014) explored how secondary students create and analyze fractal structure with Categorizer, while Psycharis and Kallia ( 2017) posed a statistical problem for students to solve with MATLAB programs. At the primary education level, students used Scratch to learn geometric figures by drawing squares and spirolaterals (Miller, 2019). It is evident that most practices of CT-based mathematics instruction are situated in mathematical (disciplinary) problem-solving contexts rather than in STEM (multidisciplinary) contexts. The lack of studies which address multidisciplinary learning in CT-based mathematics instructions is likely associated with our earlier findings that most studies were conducted in formal education context. Moreover, it has been well-documented in literature that STEM integration is difficult to practice, especially when the focus of STEM integration is on achieving mathematics learning (English, 2016). Together, the findings surrounding educational levels and settings prove that CT-related research in both STEM and mathematics education is at a beginning point, and that more empirical research is needed to inform effective integration of CT in formal K-12 curricula context.

Pedagogical aspects of CT-based mathematics instruction

In this section, we focus on the pedagogical tools and approaches that have been developed and utilized to support CT-based mathematics instruction and student learning.

Tools

While CT is generally related to computer science and programming tools, CT learning activities are not limited to plugged activities (implemented with the use of computers). Our review shows that unplugged CT activities (implemented without the use of computer) are often carried out by researchers as precursory activities for plugged CT activities, such that students would experience some target CT concepts and practices in advance, and this is conducive to students' adaptation to programming (plugged) activities (Bouck & Yadav, 2020; Sung et al., 2017). In Bouck and Yadav's ( 2020) study, for example, an unplugged game of moving plastic cups on a surface was used to help students gain a better appreciation for what it is algorithms and debugging before students began coding to move a robot. In terms of plugged activities, we identified 18 different tools and platforms used in CT-based mathematics activities across the literature, with some being conventional tools for programming and technology instruction (e.g., Python, Scratch, Robot Dash), and some being more commonly used in mathematical practices (e.g., Sketchpad, GeoGebra, MATLAB). Based on the programming platform interface, we divide these tools into two categories: screen-based programming and tangible programming (Table 2).

Under screen-based programming, by which users program within a screen (e.g., computer screen), we identified three sub-categories of programming languages: text-based programming, block-based programming, and geometrized programming. We define text-based programming tools as those requiring strict, precise, and complex syntactic rules to code, thereby often requiring a keyboard to input text (Horn & Jacob, 2006), such as Processing, Python, Matlab, and MaLT2 (Fig. 4a). In block-based programming environment (e.g., Scratch, ViMAP), students can drag and drop the visual script blocks on the screen with a mouse or their hands to program. These script blocks constitute more natural and intuitive ways to operate a program while providing useful visual cues on how and where to use program commands (Fig. 4b). Unique to CT-based mathematics instruction is a geometrized programming language, which, as Sinclair and Patterson ( 2018) proposed, is a third screen-based programming language whose elements are geometric objects rather than texts or blocks. One typical example is the Geometer's Sketchpad, and another example is Lattice Land (see Pei et al., 2018), whose interface enables users to interact directly with dots to construct segments and polygons and investigate lattice geometry as a form of geometrized programming (Fig. 4 c).

a Interface of text-based programming tool MaLT2 (Grizioti & Kynigos, 2021, p. 10); b a block-based programming tool mBot (Sáez-López et al., 2019, p. 1414); c segments and a polygon drawn in a geometrized programming tool Lattice Land (Pei et al., 2018, p. 78); d a Bee-bot robot, a form of tangible programming used in Muñoz et al., ( 2020, p. 7)

Tangible programming requires coders to use hardware objects with physical user interface to build programs, as opposed to "write" or "drag-and-drop" on the computer screen. With tangible programming, young coders can create procedural syntax to perform physical actions such as moving between two locations by scanning a code sequence ( KIBO Robot), pressing command buttons on the machine ( Bee-bot Robot; Fig. 4d), entering commands with an external remote ( Botley), and placing the desired tiles on the programming board ( Cubetto).

Although extant studies have considered the cognitive demand required on the programming tool in age-appropriate ways during CT-based mathematics activities, few researchers have explicitly communicated the affordances of the programming tool in supporting the target mathematics learning content. In response, we aim to generate further understanding from the reviewed empirical studies on this question. First, the reviewed studies suggest that the physicality of tangible programming is supportive to the learning of number, measurement, geometric shapes and spatial concepts and skills (Jurado et al., 2020; Muñoz et al., 2020; Shumway et al., 2021). Sáez-López et al. ( 2019) further recommended the use of block-based programming and robots for learning number concepts in CT-based mathematics activities, saying "there are many advantages to teaching computational concepts, coordinates, values and integer numbers as motivation for the student to learn how to operate the robot. The immediate feedback and response of the robot when operating with numbers is a powerful and highly motivational tool for students" (p. 1422). Conversely, text-based programming requires higher level of abstraction; these features make it suitable to deal with more advanced number topics, such as statistics (Gilchrist et al., 2021; Psycharis & Kallia, 2017), number sequence (Chan et al., 2021), and algebraic relationships (Kaufmann & Stenseth, 2021). We note that although the spreadsheet (e.g., Excel) is not generally defined as a CT tool, it executes some statistical functions and output upon inputting text-based formulae, and thus, it was considered as a text-based CT tool in both studies of Chan et al. ( 2021) and Valovičová et al. ( 2020).

Uniquely in a geometrized programming environment, the grammar and rules for execution are the properties of geometric objects; only when the properties of geometric objects are satisfied can the correct structure of geometric figure be constructed. Studies which adopted geometrized programming would take a "point" (in a Euclidean sense) as the most basic programming element or input, from which one can generate a more complex output, such as constructing a segment by joining two points or further formed a quadrilateral by constructing four segments. As Sinclair and Patterson ( 2018) described, applying actions on geometric objects (e.g., dragging a point) is like executing a program, and the actual behavior of the objects provides feedback that helps the coder to debug or proceed to program. In summary, geometrized programming tool as a form of computing tool is especially congruent to the learning of geometry. If future development in CT tools can be specialized to be strongly associated with a particular form or learning content at the tool level, it will open a new venue of educators to support mathematics learning in CT contexts.

Instructional approaches

Regarding CT-based mathematics instruction, we identified several common instructional approaches, and we further sub-categorized them by task structure (i.e., the organization of learning tasks and learning processes): problem-based learning (Gilchrist et al., 2021; Kaufmann & Stenseth, 2021; Ng & Cui, 2021), inquiry-based learning (Gilchrist et al., 2021; Pei et al., 2018), and project-based learning (Sinclair & Patterson, 2018). While reviewing the studies, we also note other learning modes, such as embodied learning (Sung et al., 2017), game-based learning (Grizioti & Kynigos, 2021), and pair- or group-learning (Echeverría et al., 2019; Grizioti & Kynigos, 2021; Kaufmann & Stenseth, 2021; Muñoz et al., 2020). In the present review, we focus on analyzing the characteristics of problem-based learning, project-based learning, and inquiry-based learning, since they are more dominant in the literature.

In general, the studies adopting one of these task structures share the common characteristic of implementing student-centered approaches, thereby positioning students as active mathematics learners, computational thinkers and problem solvers. They are also constructivist- or constructionist-oriented, revealing the epistemological underpinning the movement of CT for mathematics. While sharing in common the goal of constructionist or "learning-by-making" (Papert & Harel, 1991, p. 1), we note that the kinds of "making" vary among the three task structures: "making" stands for creating a programmable solution in problem-based learning, constructing a CT artefact in project-based learning, and formulating complex explanations through explorations in inquiry-based learning. In the following, we first provide an example of how each task structure manifest under CT-based mathematics activities to illuminate patterns within and across them, followed by discussing their implications for advancing the integration of CT and mathematics in K-12 contexts.

To begin, our review points to the high compatibility of problem-based learning in CT-based mathematics activities, given the central connection that CT is a mode of problem solving and a kind of analytical thinking in common with mathematical problem solving and reasoning (Baldwin et al., 2013; Wing, 2008). In this context, the main objective is to apply CT and mathematical knowledge and skills-as they are developed-during the course of problem solving. An example is provided in Kaufmann and Stenseth ( 2021), who utilized problem-based learning by first introducing the computational tool, then providing a default program as the starting problem for the students. Without providing any other scaffoldings, students grouped in pairs were asked to propose solutions to rectify the coding, so that the wheel can rotate at a constant speed and the size of the wheel can vary without affecting how the wheel rotates. This approach facilitates "autonomy and active learning experiences, to promote uncertainty and active methodologies centred on the student" (Sáez-López et al., 2019, p. 1406).

Different from problem-based learning, the goal of project-based learning is to produce CT artefacts with some project specifications; typically, the students encounter multiple problems related to CT or mathematics and need to make clear plans and reasonable decisions within their knowledge to satisfy the requirements of the project. Sinclair and Patterson ( 2018) illustrated a study adopting project-based learning, where a teacher first shared some examples of machines created with Sketchpad, led the class to brainstorm similar machines they could make, and provided instructions for the "Machine Project" with specific features (e.g., it should have animated features and involve trigonometry in some way). After students made a project proposal, they worked on their projects independently over the next 2 months and finally created a working machine with Sketchpad (see an example in Fig. 5).

Akin to the other two task structures, inquiry-based learning unfolds with an open question with no obvious solutions in CT-based mathematics context. Uniquely, this form of learning often led to new insights or discovery about mathematics by students upon being guided by a series of exploration and teacher scaffolding (Savery, 2015). This approach was adopted by Pei et al. ( 2018), who designed an activity in Lattice Land and asked students to explore the area of triangles. The teacher scaffolded students' inquiry-based learning by generating different shapes of triangles, so that students can move the vertices of triangles to identify relationships between triangular area and perimeter.

Interplay between CT and mathematics learning outcomes

When implementing CT-based mathematics activities, one assumption educators have been adopting is that the integration of computer science and mathematics education can generate affordances that a sole focus on one may not have. Naturally, a central question researchers have been inquiring is: how do students' CT and mathematics learning interact when they are involved in CT-based mathematics instruction, and what are the consequences of such interactions? While an intuitive and straightforward answer to this question is that the influences are bi-directional and beneficial for student learning, our analysis reveals non-trivial results-that there exist complex interplays and even mismatches when coordinating computational and mathematical modes of thinking. In the following sub-sections, we first review the theoretical constructs and conceptual frameworks used to characterize students' computational concepts and practices as associated with their CT-based mathematical activities. Then, we discuss the ways in which mathematics is used and learned in such contexts.

Computational concepts and practices associated with CT-based mathematical activities

Since the introduction of the notion of CT, researchers have put forward different views on the definition and components of CT (e.g., Brennan & Resnick, 2012; Hoyles & Noss, 2015; Weintrop et al., 2016). Among the 24 reviewed articles, 11 articles specified the CT definitions or frameworks used, as summarized in Table 3. Among these frameworks, Brennan and Resnick ( 2012) proposed one of the most influential framings of CT for K-12 education that consists of three dimensions: computational concepts, computational practices, and computational perspectives. We focus our following discussion on the first two dimensions as they are addressed more often in the literature.

Computational concepts

We use Table 4 to summarize the CT concepts studied by prior researchers. In addition to providing the definitions commonly accepted in computer science and adopted in the reviewed literature, we offer our interpretations of how each computational concept is operationalized and illustrated in CT-based mathematics context. In doing so, we set out to create a theoretical tool for mathematics education researchers to integrate CT in their research and teaching, and more importantly, to continually enrich and refine the definitions in future research.

One prevalent CT concept mentioned in the literature is variable. In working with CT-based mathematics tasks, students often need to define a variable and establish its initial value, and then this variable should take on subsequent values when the program is run. Besides representing a quantity, the use of variables may also be extended to represent an algebraic expression (e.g., result of operating with two or more variables; Ng & Cui, 2021), or geometric location (e.g., locus of a point having a variable location; Sinclair & Patterson, 2018) which could be stored, retrieved and operated on. The observed range of manifestation of variables provides the empirical bases for future research to learn and expand on the diverse ways taken up by the use of variables in CT-based mathematics activities.

In addition, we highlight two other important CT concepts, conditionals and loops. A conditional is a statement needed to be tested in a program, upon which further actions would take place. A student's use of conditionals often requires their knowledge of number properties (e.g., remainder of a division is non-zero; Ng & Cui, 2021), algebraic properties (e.g., when a parametric equation determines the amount of rotation of the wheels; Ng & Cui, 2021; Sinclair & Patterson, 2018) or geometric properties (e.g., when a draggable point determines how much a given shape is scaled by; Sinclair & Patterson, 2018). In particular, Sinclair and Patterson ( 2018) noted the frequent applications of conditionals in conjunction with the signum function, sgn( x) = {− 1, 0, 1} to create conditions in a geometrized programming context, which "worked as a checkpoint of sorts, operating as an if-then statement in a block of computer code" (p. 68). A loop is a code structure that enables a repetition of a certain mathematical procedure. In the case of Miller's ( 2019) study, the students formulated mathematical procedures to draw a square using Scratch. This involved considering what actions (e.g., moving and turning) were repeated, how they were repeated (e.g., constant distance and angle), and how many times to repeat (e.g., 4 times). Furthermore, Sinclair and Patterson ( 2018) conceptualized the concept of loops as being closely related to the notions of iteration and infinity. They considered a triangle construction by joining the midpoints of the line segments which formed the triangle in the previous iteration. This process of constructing line segments between the midpoints (of the previous iteration) and generating new midpoints (of the current iteration) would yield an infinite number of triangles whose area would approach zero. Other researchers have considered the productive relationship between iterations and infinity in CT-based mathematical activities (Arnon et al., 2014; Weller et al., 2003); however, limited mathematical topics have been studied regarding the interplay between the concepts of infinity and loops in K-12 contexts. We suggest that there is high potential for CT-based mathematics tasks to take up these concepts in topics, such as sequences and series with infinite terms as well as fractal geometry.

Computational practices

First, we identify systems thinking to be one of the CT practices at the first level. Systems thinking entails analyzing the problem systematically by investigating a complex system as a whole, understanding the relationships within a system, thinking in levels, communicating information about a system, defining systems and managing complexity (Weintrop et al., 2016). We further categorize systems thinking into three sub-practices: decomposition, abstraction, and algorithmic thinking.

Decomposition refers to breaking down a complex problem into many small problems; it can also be applied in a mathematical sense of "decomposing numbers, shapes, or problems in mathematics" by "considering the part-whole relationships" (Shumway et al., 2021, p. 4). As illustrated in Pei et al.'s ( 2018) study, a student named Alice attempted to solve a problem of finding the area of an irregular polygon by breaking it down into sub-areas of triangles and rectangles. Besides decomposing a complex problem into smaller, manageable sub-problems, abstraction in the sense of abstracting key information and identifying patterns of the problem can also facilitate a solution process. A typical example of this practice is the reasoning process called pattern recognition, that is, looking for similarities between and within problems, e.g., to "see patterns, recognis[e] the unit of repeat, deduce the pattern and abstract the general structure" (Miller, 2019, p. 924). Pei and colleague's ( 2018) study demonstrated pattern recognition between problems; they described a group of students abstracting a general mathematical formula from a set of data, so that they could calculate the area of any lattice polygon regardless of its shape or size.

If decomposition and abstraction serve to simplify a complex problem at the thinking level, then algorithmic thinking serves to enact the simplification at the practice level through designing a concise algorithm to solve the problem. The reviewed studies commonly defined algorithmic thinking as the systematic means of articulating a problem's solution by well-defined rules, with logical, ordered, and discrete steps to be executed by a processing agent (Kaufmann & Stenseth, 2021; Ng & Cui, 2021; Valovičová et al., 2020). An important feature of algorithmic thinking is automation, which offers efficiency in problem solving by introducing automatic steps to be taken (Valovičová et al., 2020). After completing the algorithmic design for each sub-problem, it is necessary to combine these small parts to form a more complex algorithm, which is called modularizing (Ng & Cui, 2021).

While systems thinking has mainly to do with problem solving in general, its relevance to mathematical content is not particularly apparent. Our review identifies another first-level CT practice, data practices, with stronger mathematical connections, since they relate to collecting, creating, manipulating, analyzing, and visualizing data (Weintrop et al., 2016). Under data practices, we further characterized two inter-related practices, simulation and modelling (Dickes et al., 2020; Gilchrist et al., 2021). Often, CT-based mathematical problems require one to construct a model, represent the data from an experiment (e.g., simulating the spread of a disease; Gilchrist et al., 2021; modeling the calculation of a footprint problem; Dickes et al., 2020), and predict the future trend of the simulated problem (e.g., address problems related to disease transmission through the generated computational model; Gilchrist et al., 2021; generated and discussed the modeling graphs, made predictions related to footprint size using ViMAP's grapher; Dickes et al., 2020). Besides, data practices can serve the purpose of learning a mathematical concept during inquiry-based learning. In Pei et al.'s ( 2018) study, students used microworld to explore and derive the Pick's Theorem through gathering data, and recording, sorting, and examining the data set to look for and generalize relationships. This study was an example in which "students used computational tools to facilitate these data-driven computational thinking practices" (p. 85).

The remaining two categories of practices (i.e., Brennan & Resnick's [ 2012] reusing and remixing, testing and debugging) are specific to computational problem solving, in the sense that mathematical problem solving is necessarily situated in the programming environment and tool use. Reusing and remixing involve the coders building on and extending some existing codes and ideas to create a new or more complex program (Ng & Cui, 2021). Testing and debugging are necessary to ensure the solution can solve the tasks successfully (Cui & Ng, 2021). Testing often occurs before debugging, which is to "ensure that things work" (Ng & Cui, 2021, p. 6). If not, then debugging will follow to recognize, locate and fix errors or mistakes when they arise (Bouck & Yadav, 2020; Ng & Cui, 2021).

To summarize, our contribution is toward a systematic organization of the set of computational practices evident in the literature. It is worth noting that these practices can occur simultaneously to facilitate problem solving; meanwhile, they are the very CT learning outcomes co-developed with mathematics learning outcomes during the course of problem solving. An illustrative example was given by Sinclair and Patterson ( 2018), who discussed a variety of other CT concepts and practices evident when students constructed a complex machine in Sketchpad (see an example in Fig. 5). First, they decomposed the machine into components and actions into smaller movements and animations ( decomposition). When creating small animations, they needed to understand the sequence of the steps to link them together into a complete operation ( algorithmic thinking). To create these decomposed steps, students also needed to transform real phenomena (e.g., to create a parabolic trajectory) into mathematical objects (e.g., trigonometric or quadratic curve) ( abstraction and pattern recognition). There were also multiple CT concepts involved in the activity: algebraic or geometric parameters that determine the characteristics of a machine ( variable), the use of functions as conditions to control certain motions ( conditionals), and the concept of subroutines and loop were used to operate programs controlled by certain buttons and to repeat certain actions. The vast examples provided in this section show that CT concepts and practices can fruitfully support mathematical meaning-making and representations of mathematical relationships when situated in the task of constructing a meaningful CT artefact. Thus, mathematical explorations can serve as a site for students to engage in CT in explicit ways, where the mathematical operations change what appear on the interface.

Mathematical learning outcomes demonstrated in computational contexts

Besides the aforementioned CT learning outcomes, the reviewed literature also conveys a range of mathematical ideas covered in CT-based mathematics instruction (see a summary in Table 5). Several studies have also researched the associated mathematical processes, such as problem-solving (Gilchrist et al., 2021; Psycharis & Kallia, 2017), algebraic thinking (Ng & Cui, 2021), modeling (Araya, 2021; Sinclair & Patterson, 2018), mathematical reasoning (Kaufmann & Stenseth, 2021), and generalization and pattern recognition (Miller, 2019; Wilerson-Jerde's, 2014). To further demonstrate how students' mathematical reasoning facilitates and emerges from computational contexts, we focus our discussion on three aspects. First, we discuss how students apply their mathematical knowledge to construct CT artefacts, including the challenges they may experience during the application. Next, we discuss how they draw upon their mathematics to anticipate and interpret CT outputs and how these processes are tied to their debugging practices. Then, we discuss the reciprocal influence in the sense that students' engagement with CT-math integrated tasks are generative to growth in their mathematical knowledge, and we identify ways through which such learning occurs.

Applying mathematical knowledge to construct CT artefacts

Numerous researchers have stressed the important role of mathematical knowledge in solving CT-based mathematical tasks, and in particular, in constructing computer programs to produce certain mathematical outcomes (e.g., Bouck & Yadav, 2020; Dickes et al., 2020; Grizioti & Kynigos, 2021; Miller, 2019). Influenced by Papert's ( 1980) Logo programming, several studies involved students constructing computer programs to generate a certain geometric shape (e.g., right triangles, squares, rectangles, parallelograms, trapezoids, and rhombuses; Bouck & Yadav, 2020; Miller, 2019). In doing so, the students necessarily drew on their knowledge of the constituting elements of the shapes (e.g., number of sides and angle size) and the relationship of those elements (e.g., parallelism or perpendicularity). A similar task design has been extended to the context of atypical shapes. For example, in Miller's ( 2019) study, a group of second graders (aged 7-8 years) were asked to use Scratch to draw a spirolateral (see Fig. 7a). The students were able to identify the structure of the spirolateral which pertained growing and repeating patterns (Fig. 7b, c), and then, they translated their observed structure into Scratch codes (Fig. 7 d).

a Spirolateral shown to students, b, c students' conceived structure of the spirolateral, and d sample Scratch codes (Miller, 2019, pp. 923-924)

In algebraic contexts, a study was conducted by Dickes et al. ( 2020), in which a group of third graders used the command "repeat" to model the relationship between total distance and step size (Total Distance = No. of Repeats × Step size); this reflected that the students had constructed a multiplicative relationship between the quantities involved. As another example, Ng and Cui ( 2021) designed the Doubling Machine problem in which a bank account balance increased by a doubling amount of deposit in each subsequent week (i.e., $3, $9, $21, $45...). One pair of students observed that the next number always equals to the previous number times two plus three (i.e., \({t}_{n}= 2{t}_{n}+ 3\)) and translated this relationship into codes "[set button_value to][button_value * 2]" followed by "[set button_value to][button_value + 3]." In each of these examples, mathematics was used in an applied manner, and the students translated their conceived mathematical relationships and structures to computer languages and programs.

Despite the supporting role of mathematics in the construction of CT artefacts, there have been studies focused on the challenges students experience during their enactment of mathematics in computational contexts. As argued by Ng and colleagues (2021), these challenges were due to the mismatches or contradictions between CT and mathematical thinking (Cui & Ng, 2021; Ng et al., 2021; Sinclair & Patterson, 2018). For example, displaying a result requires an additional code during programming (e.g., calculating 5 + 3 = 8 and then displaying 8), whereas in mathematics, carrying out an operation automatically leads to a result (e.g., calculating 5 + 3 = 8 is a single operation; Cui & Ng, 2021; Ng et al., 2021). In addition, Jackiw and Finzer ( 1993) explained how debugging a sketch in dynamic geometry environments might differ from debugging in traditional programming environments. That is, the former requires "reasoning from the manifestation of a bug backwards...towards its cause" (ibid, p. 301), while the latter requires identifying the manifestation of a bug, locating the source of a bug, and re-executing the program circuitously.

The notions of variables and the way they are operated on also differ in mathematics and computing contexts. For example, in mathematics, the use of a variable in an equation already implies that the variable can take on any values, but in programming environments, one needs to write a line of codes to tell the computer to increase the variable by one (Cui & Ng, 2021). Another issue relates to the use of equal signs. In mathematics, one way of interpreting an equation is that two entities on both sides are equal (e.g., \(y=x*2\)), but in programming, it means "performing some repetitive actions on a single quantity" (e.g., Set [variable] to [variable] *2 or [variable] = [variable]*2) (Cui & Ng, 2021, p. 19). As a result, students often encountered difficulties translating their conceived mathematical relationship from a problem situation into its programming equivalent.

To conclude, we highlight the take-away message by these empirical findings: despite the fact that mathematical knowledge plays a supportive role in constructing CT artefacts, the differences between CT and mathematical thinking may constrain students from understanding or practicing specific CT or mathematical concepts. As suggested by many scholars, these discrepancies might lead to problems in programming even if the students understand the problem situation and the mathematical relationships behind. Therefore, it is crucial for mathematics education researchers and mathematics educators to address these discrepancies to improve the integration of CT into mathematics learning.

Applying mathematical knowledge to anticipate and interpret CT artefacts

During programming, students may apply their mathematical knowledge to anticipate and interpret CT artefacts beyond making a workable program. We further classify four forms of such application based on the literature: (1) making sense of outputs, (2) anticipating outputs, (3) mediating debugging, and (4) code modeling.

Making sense of outputs

One form of such application is applying one's mathematical knowledge to make sense of the outputs. In Wilerson-Jerde's ( 2014) study, a group of middle graders used a fractal construction tool (Fig. 8) to construct a collection of fractals. In doing so, the students interpreted why the produced fractals looked the way they were based on the creation rules (e.g., square-size, rotation-angle, reflection-axis). In a prior lesson, the students had already learned about fractals, including different types of fractals and how they could be produced. Therefore, the aim of the current activity was in supporting students' reflection upon features of fractals and in making sense of the rules that produce them in a CT context.

Another study by Pei et al. ( 2018) reported on a student making connections between her exploration within the Lattice Land environment and the triangle area formula she had previously learned. By interacting with Lattice Land, the student could see how moving a vertex along the line parallel to the base would change the shape of the triangle yet keep the area fixed. At first, the student was surprised by this observation, but then she recalled the area formula for a triangle (\(Area=\frac{1}{2}\times Base \times Height\)), which explained the conservation of area in the geometrized CT environment. Similar to the previous theme, the reasoning processes entailed by these two examples involve students' enactment of existing mathematical knowledge; what distinguish them from the prior theme is that the students were building novel connections between their mathematical knowledge and the CT outputs. Therefore, mathematics is not merely used in an applied manner, and the students deepen and reorganize their mathematical knowledge as they recontextualize it in a CT environment.

Anticipating outputs

Studies observing this theme relate to the way students draw on their mathematical knowledge to anticipate the outputs of a computer program. The students are aware of the mathematics needed to evaluate the program and they compare its outputs to the intended goal. In Shumway et al.'s ( 2021) study, a group of kindergarten students (aged 5-6 years) engaged in an activity with the Cubetto robot coding toy, and they were asked to create programs to instruct the robot to move between two destinations. The robot's movement provided students instant feedback about the accuracy of the program in terms of the desired movement. When the robot moved some steps short of or over the goal, the students would revise the program by adding or removing some codes. This evidences how the students' knowledge of space, measurement, and number operations facilitated their anticipation of the robot movement and the associated debugging actions. As Shumway et al. ( 2021) described, students can "[think] one step ahead of the robot in anticipation of evaluating the accuracy of their sequence of codes in the program" (p. 20).

Dickes et al. ( 2020) offered another example of students realizing their program was incorrect due to their outputs being inconsistent with their mathematical calculations. Specifically, the students noticed that the total distance represented in their graph was 240 units, while the total distance calculated using the rate equation was 300 units (15 step size \(\times\) 20 number of steps = 300 units of total distance). They subsequently revisited the program and corrected the programming error to obtain a desired result. Similar to the previous example, the students' mathematical thinking guided their evaluation of the computer program and motivated their debugging.

Mediating debugging practices

We also identify examples, where mathematical reasoning not only motivated students' debugging practices but also guided and mediated the debugging practices themselves. In a study by Kaufmann and Stenseth ( 2021), a group of students in Grade 8 and Grade 9 (age 13 and 14) were asked to troubleshoot a program, so that a wheel would rotate along a line, such that its diameter hits the target markers on the line. The students initially used intuition and trial-and-error to change their codes without any mathematical basis; eventually, they attended to the circumference and its relationship to other quantities to debug the program successfully. In this example, mathematics was not applied to construct the program per se, but it was used for locating and fixing the bugs. Kaufmann and Stenseth ( 2021) further proposed a model to characterize how mathematics mediates the complex process of troubleshooting; as they shown in Fig. 9, the use of mathematics is intertwined within the iterative process of testing, observing and analyzing, making hypothesis, and changing program.

Code modeling

Code modeling refers to students interpreting the mathematics underlying a sequence of codes, sometimes during the process of debugging. Ng and Cui ( 2021) described a pair of students who debugged a program for generating a prime number detector. They modeled the outcomes of two set of codes, with one having the conditions ('remainder = 0' and 'remainder > 0') within a repeat loop and one outside the loop, and they realized that they should have placed the conditions within the loop to check the remainder before (as opposed to after) carrying out the next division. Different from the previous examples, this instance is illustrative of students using their mathematical knowledge to model the behavior of a given set of codes. Code modeling allowed them to realize that the codes behaved in a way against the intended mathematical operations, and hence to revise the program accordingly.

Summary

Examples in these four themes commonly involve students applying their mathematical knowledge to anticipate or interpret CT artefacts, but there are nuances between them. First, using mathematics to make sense of CT outputs can engender novel mathematical connections that were not present previously. In terms of the other three themes which relate directly to debugging practices, students can (1) recognize a buggy program by comparing the outputs with the anticipated outcomes; (2) fix the bugs by reconsidering the mathematical relationships relevant to the situation; or (3) fix the bugs by modeling the mathematical behavior underlying the program. We consider it significant to tease out and illustrate these nuances across the literature, since they shed light on the foundational role of mathematics for CT as well as the insights into how mathematics is used in explicit but different ways in CT contexts.

Generating new mathematical knowledge in parallel with CT development

First, students can construct mathematical ideas and relationships by reflecting on CT outputs. For example, in Wilerson-Jerde's ( 2014) study, the students were asked to use the Categorizer tool to create categories that reflected certain features about fractals (e.g., density, "crispness" or "fuzziness", twisting structure, branching structure, sponging structure, and area reduction). By observing a collection of fractals produced by the computer, the students were offered opportunities to "explore important mathematical properties of those structures, and offered more ways to construct fractals with particular mathematical properties" (p. 118). In another study by Pei et al. ( 2018), students collected data from a number of polygons in Lattice Land and derived the Pick's Theorem1 by reasoning with the data and generalizing pattern from the data. In each of these examples, students made use of the affordances of computational tools to create numerous examples and outcomes that they could reflect upon and generalize from. The rich mathematical conversations around those CT outputs facilitated the students' constructions of deep mathematical ideas and relationships.

Another avenue through which new mathematical ideas are constructed is reflecting on the programming processes and code features. In Miller's ( 2019) study, a group of students created codes for making a square and deduced a generalized rule for calculating the perimeter of a square by identifying the repeating patterns from the codes (i.e., perimeter of a square equals four times its length). The author concluded that these primary school students "were forming generalizations when writing computer codes" (ibid, p. 925), suggesting that teaching mathematics through coding may provide opportunities for students to "see the mathematics in a deeper way and build a more connected understanding" (ibid, p. 923). As another example, Pei et al. ( 2018) described a classroom discussion centered on calculating the areas of triangles whose side lengths were not whole numbers in the Lattice Land environment (Fig. 10). Using the "draw segment" tool, the students came up with different ways to "box" the triangles and calculate their areas. These novel methods were only possible when students used the construction function of the programming tool and reflected on the construction processes and products.

Third, CT-based mathematics instruction motivates a new form of mathematical knowledge that is represented by computational languages and unique to CT contexts. For example, Ng and Cui ( 2021) discussed a group of elementary students who had no prior knowledge of algebraic expressions and variables, but they could use iterations like '[set total to] [total + money]' and '[set money to] [money *2]' to model a geometric series. It was noteworthy that these students could make use of commands and codes to model mathematical relationships whose algebraic forms were not yet accessible to them in paper-and-pencil context. Therefore, the authors concluded that mathematical content can be "purposefully synergized in a programming context" (ibid, p. 859) to make advanced and historically challenging ideas accessible to younger children and "can serve as a bridge for children to advance their arithmetic thinking toward building coherent and meaningful learning of more advanced algebra in later years" (ibid, p. 858). Shumway et al. ( 2021) made a similar claim by showing evidence of kindergarten students expressing their emerging knowledge of spatial orientation, spatial movement, measurement, and numbers by imitating a robot toy's motion, suggesting their mathematical knowledge is embedded in their programming activities. The author also argued that those activities afforded students coordinating interconnected domains of mathematical knowledge (i.e., simultaneously using their spatial reasoning and knowledge of numbers) and constructing dynamic perspective of relevant concepts, which went beyond the kindergarten standards.

In summary, this group of literature provides rich evidence that confirms the affordances of CT-math integration in K-12 education. Such integration supports students' abstraction of a variety of mathematical ideas (e.g., geometric properties, formulas, theorems). Through interacting with the CT environment, students are offered opportunities to explore a variety of mathematical contents through reflecting upon the CT construction processes and products. Furthermore, the CT-math integration opens up new possibilities of learning mathematics, ultimately transforming traditional views of the nature of mathematics and mathematics learning. As the literature showed, the integration increases accessibility of mathematical ideas to young kids and allows more mathematical connections made. It also contributes to the emergence of a new form of mathematical knowledge and reasoning mode that bear characteristics of computing (e.g., syntax representations of algebraic relationships), which leave seeds for students' future mathematical abstraction and development.

Discussion and future research directions

CT is the thought process entailing abstracting, algorithmic thinking, and computational modeling in combination with the use of programming tools to solve a series of complex problems (Wing, 2006). When engaging CT-based mathematical activities, students not only produce CT artefacts and programmable solutions in a physical sense, but also construct meanings for various CT and mathematical concepts. Despite positive findings about the impact of CT-based mathematical activities on student learning, consensus has not been reached regarding how to integrate the two fields in coherent and meaningful ways. This systematic review has clarified, with concrete examples, the topics, education levels, pedagogical arrangements including learning resources, and the degree of integration among other STEM disciplines in which recent studies have investigated in relation to CT-based mathematics learning. Together, these studies have shown that no matter which descriptor of learning context is concerned, CT should not be introduced as an add-on to mathematics learning, but considerations for research and practice is warranted at a conceptual level to fully understand and maximize the ways CT may support mathematics learning.

Our study sets out to review the impact of CT-based mathematics instruction on student learning through four aspects: educational context, pedagogical approach, theoretical construct related to CT and mathematics learning outcomes, and the interplay between CT and mathematics in CT-based mathematical activities. From each of these aspects, our review suggests several affordances of CT which can foster and enrich mathematics learning: first, we observe that programming activities afford non-prescribed mathematics learning in unstructured ways and with little prior knowledge necessary. Second, problem-based learning and project-based learning are particularly compatible with CT-based mathematics instruction. Third, CT integration in mathematics education has proven to be supportive in the content of algebra and geometry across education levels. Finally, CT can serve as both the means (when applying mathematical knowledge to anticipate or interpret CT artefacts) and goals (when applying mathematical knowledge to construct CT artefacts) of learning in CT-based mathematics activities. That is, CT-based mathematical activities afforded students to develop and apply their CT alongside their mathematical knowledge. In particular, we evidenced students' CT development by their ability to use diverse commands, flexibility in sequencing codes, and efficiency in debugging (Dickes et al., 2020; Kaufmann & Stenseth, 2021; Ng & Cui, 2021); simultaneously as the students' CT concepts and practices emerged, the CT-based mathematics activities also became progressively more mathematically grounded and rigorous.

Altogether, these characteristics have important implications to how we organize mathematics learning activities in computationally enhanced ways, and if taken up, can be highly transformative in the way we structure the mathematics curricula and instruction. Wilkerson-Jerde ( 2014) posits that, "computational ideas provide new and powerful ways of thinking about math and science phenomena" (p. 101); specifically, we highlight the re-orientation of sequencing of mathematical topics as well as the pedagogical aspects of mathematics instructions that are made possible in CT environments (Ng et al., forthcoming). In addition, we draw attention to the mutual support and affordance of CT and mathematical activities, and in turn, highlight the potential of designing CT instruction around mathematical inquiry for co-developing CT and mathematical understandings (Pei et al., 2018).

One way forward [...] is through the creation of blended curricula that infuse computational thinking practices into topics from other domains. In doing so, the destination domain can serve as a context for developing and using computational thinking practices while also presenting learners with new, computationally facilitated approaches for exploring disciplinary ideas. (p. 76)

Besides, we conclude that research on the following areas is currently lacking:

1. 1.
CT-based mathematics instructions taking place in formal and interdisciplinary education settings. This also implies that teachers' professional development concerning the emergent competency of CT-based mathematics thinking is indispensable.

2. 2.
design experiments within geometrized programming environments, and more generally, the role of different computing tools in supporting mathematics learning;

3. 3.
empirical studies highlighting the different ways in which CT and mathematics learning co-develop, including the potential of integrating CT in other domains of mathematics (e.g., calculus and statistics), and what can be learned from CT-based mathematics instructions in these contexts, both in terms of how CT support mathematics learning, and vice versa.

In conclusion, this study lays the groundwork for future research into more coherent and effective integration of CT in K-12 mathematics education. We encourage more research on the integration of child-friendly programming instructional designs and tools for adoption in primary education or lower to begin integration of CT concepts early in mathematics teaching and learning. Regarding undergraduate mathematics education, we suggest that, due to the nature of the mathematical content, the integration of CT in this context seems to be more natural and common than K-12 education. Different than K-12 mathematics teaching that often rely on paper-and-pencil, it is not uncommon to find an undergraduate mathematics class that includes CT components. However, despite the predominate CT-math integration at the collegiate level, there has been few research that provides fine-grained analysis of the interplay between CT and mathematics learning, although recent work by Lockwood, Sand, and colleagues have paid explicit attention to this research line (Lockwood, 2022; Lockwood & De Chenne, 2020, 2021; Sand et al., 2022). In addition, more interestingly, these scholars' findings echo the types of interplay we have identified in the current review, and future research can continue to gain insights into how the interactions between CT and mathematical thinking may manifest differently or similarly in both contexts (Lockwood & Mørken, 2021; Lockwood, et al., 2019).

Notably, although most studies provide empirical evidence in the mutual relationship between CT and mathematics learning outcomes, authors of two articles conveyed that students' CT engagement did not support their mathematical learning (Chan et al., 2021; Psycharis & Kallia, 2017). Given the contradictory claims of these two studies with other studies reviewed, there remains future work in understanding how to maximize the effective role of CT in students' mathematical learning and vice versa. Specifically, to offer an explanation for these discrepant results, researchers need to not only focus on students' learning outcomes and their correlations with CT engagement, but also focus on the qualitative nuances in the students' learning processes and identify and compare the essential features of the tasks and instructional approaches that generate the discrepant learning outcomes.

Availability of data and materials

This is a systematic review of prior literature. All articles we reviewed here are accessible in Web of Science database.

Notes

The Pick's Theorem states that suppose that a polygon has integer coordinates for all of its vertices. Let I be the number of integer points that are interior to the polygon, and let B be the number of integer points on its boundary (including vertices as well as points along the sides of the polygon). Then, the area A of the polygon is: \(A=0.5B+I-1\).

Abbreviations

CT:

Computational thinking

PRISMA:

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses

STEM:

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics

STEAM:

Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics

WOS:

Web of Science

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Acknowledgements

This paper was fully supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Committee, General Research Fund (Ref No. 14603720).

Funding

This study is supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Committee, General Research Fund (Ref No. 14603720).

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Authors and Affiliations

1. Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Faculty of Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong

Huiyan Ye, Oi-Lam Ng & Ching Sing Chai

2. Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong

Biyao Liang

Contributions

All authors contributed to the design and implementation of this study. Literature searches with agreed-upon search terms were completed by the first author. Then, the first, second and third author collaboratively worked on the process of literature selection, coding, and themes identification. The first author and second author conducted the analysis and interpretation of the reviewed literature with help of the third and fourth author. Findings were discussed and agreed by all authors. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Oi-Lam Ng.

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Ye, H., Liang, B., Ng, OL. et al. Integration of computational thinking in K-12 mathematics education: a systematic review on CT-based mathematics instruction and student learning. IJ STEM Ed 10, 3 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-023-00396-w
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Integration of computational thinking in K-12 mathematics education: a systematic review on CT-based mathematics instruction and student learning - International Journal of STEM Education

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There has been substantial research undertaken on the integration of computational thinking (CT) in K-12 mathematics education in recent years, particularly since 2018 when relevant systematic reviews were conducted on the topic. Many empirical studies in this area have yet to elaborate clearly and explicitly on how CT may support mathematics learning, or otherwise, in CT-based mathematics activities.

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Career challenges like reorganizations, layoffs, and a lack of personal fulfillment can feel like big bumps in the road, but instead of seeing them as obstacles, start to look for the opportunities. Personal career development is critical for resilience in the face of uncertainty and change.

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Introduction to Khanmigo | Khan for Educators (US) | Khan Academy

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Introduction to Khanmigo | Khan for Educators (US) | Khan Academy

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Introduction to Khanmigo | Khan for Educators (US) | Khan Academy

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AI for education | Life skills | Khan Academy

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AI for education | Life skills | Khan Academy

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Let Khan Academy and our partners-including Code.org, Common Sense Education, aiEDU, and Professors Ethan and Lilach Mollick-be your trusted partners as we navigate this exciting learning journey together! What is generative AI and how does it work? What are some best practices for teaching and learning with generative AI? This course-in-progress answers those questions and many more. Welcome!

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AI for education | Life skills | Khan Academy

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Khan Academy believes that AI and Large Language Models hold the potential to transform education. By providing teachers and students resources and tools to design joyful, personalized, interactive, engaging learning experiences that drive deep learning in the months and years ahead, we hope to become a trusted partner in this learning journey.

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Khan Academy’s AI Tool for the Classroom: Teacher + Student Edition

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Students aren't consumers of facts. They are active creators of knowledge. Schools aren't just brick-and-mortar structures -- they're centers of lifelong learning. And, most important, teaching is recognized as one of the most challenging and respected career choices, absolutely vital to the social, cultural, and economic health of our nation.

Today, the seeds of such a dramatic transformation in education are being planted. Prompted by massive revolutions in knowledge, information technology, and public demand for better learning, schools nationwide are slowly but surely restructuring themselves.

Leading the way are thousands of teachers who are rethinking every part of their jobs -- their relationship with students, colleagues, and the community; the tools and techniques they employ; their rights and responsibilities; the form and content of curriculum; what standards to set and how to assess whether they are being met; their preparation as teachers and their ongoing professional development; and the very structure of the schools in which they work. In short, teachers are reinventing themselves and their occupation to better serve schools and students.

New Relationships and Practices

Traditionally, teaching was a combination of information-dispensing, custodial child care and sorting out academically inclined students from others. The underlying model for schools was an education factory in which adults, paid hourly or daily wages, kept like-aged youngsters sitting still for standardized lessons and tests.

Teachers were told what, when, and how to teach. They were required to educate every student in exactly the same way and were not held responsible when many failed to learn. They were expected to teach using the same methods as past generations, and any deviation from traditional practices was discouraged by supervisors or prohibited by myriad education laws and regulations. Thus, many teachers simply stood in front of the class and delivered the same lessons year after year, growing gray and weary of not being allowed to change what they were doing.

Many teachers today, however, are encouraged to adapt and adopt new practices that acknowledge both the art and science of learning. They understand that the essence of education is a close relationship between a knowledgeable, caring adult and a secure, motivated child. They grasp that their most important role is to get to know each student as an individual in order to comprehend his or her unique needs, learning style, social and cultural background, interests, and abilities.

This attention to personal qualities is all the more important as America continues to become the most pluralistic nation on Earth. Teachers have to be committed to relating to youngsters of many cultures, including those young people who, with traditional teaching, might have dropped out -- or have been forced out -- of the education system.

Their job is to counsel students as they grow and mature -- helping them integrate their social, emotional, and intellectual growth -- so the union of these sometimes separate dimensions yields the abilities to seek, understand, and use knowledge; to make better decisions in their personal lives; and to value contributing to society.

They must be prepared and permitted to intervene at any time and in any way to make sure learning occurs. Rather than see themselves solely as masters of subject matter such as history, math, or science, teachers increasingly understand that they must also inspire a love of learning.

In practice, this new relationship between teachers and students takes the form of a different concept of instruction. Tuning in to how students really learn prompts many teachers to reject teaching that is primarily lecture based in favor of instruction that challenges students to take an active role in learning.

They no longer see their primary role as being the king or queen of the classroom, a benevolent dictator deciding what's best for the powerless underlings in their care. They've found they accomplish more if they adopt the role of educational guides, facilitators, and co-learners.

The most respected teachers have discovered how to make students passionate participants in the instructional process by providing project-based, participatory, educational adventures. They know that in order to get students to truly take responsibility for their own education, the curriculum must relate to their lives, learning activities must engage their natural curiosity, and assessments must measure real accomplishments and be an integral part of learning.

Students work harder when teachers give them a role in determining the form and content of their schooling -- helping them create their own learning plans and deciding the ways in which they will demonstrate that they have, in fact, learned what they agreed to learn.

The day-to-day job of a teacher, rather than broadcasting content, is becoming one of designing and guiding students through engaging learning opportunities. An educator's most important responsibility is to search out and construct meaningful educational experiences that allow students to solve real-world problems and show they have learned the big ideas, powerful skills, and habits of mind and heart that meet agreed-on educational standards. The result is that the abstract, inert knowledge that students used to memorize from dusty textbooks comes alive as they participate in the creation and extension of new knowledge.

New Tools and Environments

One of the most powerful forces changing teachers' and students' roles in education is new technology. The old model of instruction was predicated on information scarcity. Teachers and their books were information oracles, spreading knowledge to a population with few other ways to get it.

But today's world is awash in information from a multitude of print and electronic sources. The fundamental job of teaching is no longer to distribute facts but to help children learn how to use them by developing their abilities to think critically, solve problems, make informed judgments, and create knowledge that benefits both the students and society. Freed from the responsibility of being primary information providers, teachers have more time to spend working one-on-one or with small groups of students.

Recasting the relationship between students and teachers demands that the structure of school changes as well. Though it is still the norm in many places to isolate teachers in cinderblock rooms with age-graded pupils who rotate through classes every hour throughout a semester -- or every year, in the case of elementary school -- this paradigm is being abandoned in more and more schools that want to give teachers the time, space, and support to do their jobs.

Extended instructional periods and school days, as well as reorganized yearly schedules, are all being tried as ways to avoid chopping learning into often arbitrary chunks based on limited time. Also, rather than inflexibly group students in grades by age, many schools feature mixed-aged classes in which students spend two or more years with the same teachers.

In addition, ability groups, from which those judged less talented can rarely break free, are being challenged by a recognition that current standardized tests do not measure many abilities or take into account the different ways people learn best.

One of the most important innovations in instructional organization is team teaching, in which two or more educators share responsibility for a group of students. This means that an individual teacher no longer has to be all things to all students. This approach allows teachers to apply their strengths, interests, skills, and abilities to the greatest effect, knowing that children won't suffer from their weaknesses, because there's someone with a different set of abilities to back them up.

To truly professionalize teaching, in fact, we need to further differentiate the roles a teacher might fill. Just as a good law firm has a mix of associates, junior partners, and senior partners, schools should have a greater mix of teachers who have appropriate levels of responsibility based on their abilities and experience levels. Also, just as much of a lawyer's work occurs outside the courtroom, so, too, should we recognize that much of a teacher's work is done outside the classroom.

New Professional Responsibilities

Aside from rethinking their primary responsibility as directors of student learning, teachers are also taking on other roles in schools and in their profession. They are working with colleagues, family members, politicians, academics, community members, employers, and others to set clear and obtainable standards for the knowledge, skills, and values we should expect America's children to acquire. They are participating in day-to-day decision making in schools, working side-by-side to set priorities, and dealing with organizational problems that affect their students' learning.

Many teachers also spend time researching various questions of educational effectiveness that expand the understanding of the dynamics of learning. And more teachers are spending time mentoring new members of their profession, making sure that education school graduates are truly ready for the complex challenges of today's classrooms.

Reinventing the role of teachers inside and outside the classroom can result in significantly better schools and better-educated students. But though the roots of such improvement are taking hold in today's schools, they need continued nurturing to grow and truly transform America's learning landscape. The rest of us -- politicians and parents, superintendents and school board members, employers and education school faculty -- must also be willing to rethink our roles in education to give teachers the support, freedom, and trust they need to do the essential job of educating our children.

Judith Taack Lanier is a distinguished professor of education at Michigan State University.

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Redefining the Role of the Teacher: It's a Multifaceted Profession

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A closer look at what being an educator really means.

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Happy 30 years, AmeriCorps!

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AmeriCorps 30th Anniversary: A Movement, Not a Moment

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How can we relate this discussion to our work as a fellow?

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Earvin "Magic" Johnson: Understand Your Customers and Over-Deliver

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In Florida, the list of 20,000-plus banned books includes Nutrition For Dummies and PCs For Dummies. In New Hampshire, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy makes the list. Texas, which bans nearly 9,000 books, once counted a collection of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets among them. In New York, one prison attempted to ban a book of maps of the moon because it could "present risks of escape."

The examples here serve to demonstrate the expansive, arbitrary, and absurd ways in which prisons make materials inaccessible to people behind bars. Across the United States, agencies have issued an ever-evolving list of restrictions on what people in prison can read. Works by Black authors, civil rights literature, critiques of mass incarceration, books in languages other than English-all are frequently censored. (Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf and books by David Duke have been allowed in some of those same prisons.)

Restrictions aren't limited to book titles. Maps, survival guides, and even specific magazine issues (of Reader's Digest and Rolling Stone, among others) are prohibited. Restrictions vary from state to state, facility to facility. Ultimately, such policies underscore how corrections agencies and staff limit incarcerated people's access to the written word-and, by extension, their access to information. And they succeed in doing so without much public awareness or oversight.

"Anything to educate or empower [is] screened by the mailroom," and most often banned, Cynthia Simons, the coordinator of the Texas Women's Justice Coalition, told the magazine Scalawag.

Prisons treat books as " restricted commodities" that pose threats within prison walls. But for people who are incarcerated, books allow them to establish a connection to the outside world, connections that increase their chances of success after release. Books create opportunities, enabling people to leave prison with knowledge they didn't have before. Seemingly, that's not what corrections agencies want.

"Approved vendors" only

Facilities don't just try to control what people in prison read. In recent years, some states have outlined who can send books to people in prison-and who can't. Several states prevent family and friends from mailing books directly to incarcerated people, requiring that they come from bookstores or publishers. Last April, the Iowa Department of Corrections extended this ban to third parties, barring bookstores and nonprofits from sending books to people behind bars. Now, people incarcerated in Iowa must buy the books themselves from a list of approved vendors, and used books are prohibited altogether.

At least four federal prisons have enacted similar policies, according to Julia Mascioli, deputy director at Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop. The nonprofit primarily works with people from Washington, DC, who are held in Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facilities across the country, sending them books, writing resources, and other materials.

But the books Free Minds sent to its members started coming back from Federal Correctional Institution (FCI), Beckley in West Virginia in April 2020, and from FCI Schuylkill in Pennsylvania that August. FCI Manchester in Kentucky began rejecting books around February 2021, and United States Penitentiary, McCreary, also in Kentucky, followed suit last month. Mascioli said all have adopted bans like Iowa's, requiring that incarcerated people purchase books themselves from a few approved publishers who offer a limited catalog at prices higher than those of other booksellers.

The bans, including Iowa's, are based on an unsubstantiated narrative that books may contain contraband (which is also the explanation given for recent bans on mail). Mascioli said some BOP facilities briefly implemented similar restrictions in 2017, only to walk them back when the Washington Post pressed for further information. She fears that this renewed trickle signals that more facilities will adopt similar policies as time goes on.

"How much of the actual contraband coming in do books account for?" Mascioli said. "When we call and ask about these policies, that's what [corrections officers] say. But I haven't seen anything from the Bureau of Prisons backing this up."

Andy Chan, president of Seattle-based nonprofit Books to Prisoners' board, said he frequently sees books rejected because they contain " racial" content or content that is detrimental to the " good order " of the prison. He added that Books to Prisoners encounters new restrictions "all the time," and recent moves to restrict books by prison authorities have been more "subtle."

"Things pop up, and we haven't heard anything about them," Chan said. Books to Prisoners is run in large part by volunteers. "There's no way [we] can proactively keep on top of this stuff."

Fighting the bans on books

Books to Prisoners has first-hand experience fighting book-banning policies. When the Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC) pushed out a ban on used books, in March 2019, it did so quietly. Books to Prisoners staff only realized when they started receiving rejection notices from prisons. Some digging uncovered a memo, posted on the DOC's website, that cited a rise in contraband as the reason for the rule change.

"They don't advertise these kinds of things," Chan said.

Books to Prisoners mobilized swiftly-and fought the ban successfully. It marshalled support from across the country, tapping into the informal network of organizations that donate books to incarcerated people. It took to social media and brought the policy change to the attention of local press, which led The Seattle Times to request further information from the DOC.

While advocates and the public flooded the DOC with emails and phone calls, The Seattle Times's information request revealed that none of the 17 instances the agency originally cited to back the ban had anything to do with contraband entering prisons inside books. And about a month after the DOC first issued the ban, it was reversed.

No transparency

It's seldom the case that states or facilities make lists of their banned books publicly available. State departments of corrections create policies that prison officials have wide-ranging discretion to interpret and enforce. Chan said it often seems like the sole decision-making power rests with the mailroom staffer who receives the package. He added that, in the network of nonprofits that send books to people in prison, it's known that prisons may accept books that were previously rejected, and vice versa. Some states have even said they make decisions on a case-by-case basis and don't track rejections or subsequent appeals.

PEN America's 2019 survey of prison censorship similarly found that there's little oversight or public visibility on how prison authorities censor content. Nonprofit organizations that send books to people in prison struggle to keep up with opaque restrictions. The Tennessee Prison Books Project wrote last fall that many of the books it has sent out have been returned, supposedly for "safety" reasons. In January 2022, a rejection notice Books to Prisoners received from a Tennessee prison for a Scholastic biography of Malcolm X simply read " Malcolm X not allowed." Chan said the organization receives a handful of them every week. It's impossible to say how many books never make it to their intended recipients because such notices aren't standard.

This lack of transparency means that U.S. prisons' book-banning practices could be far more extensive than we know. But there have been wins, as advocates-including volunteer-led organizations and people who have been incarcerated-have helped successfully fight bans on books by intensifying public pressure, pursuing lawsuits, and gaining the support of governors and other state officials.

"There's no cookie-cutter approach to responding to these things," Chan said.

The ongoing, insidious assault on access to books must end. Prison officials must scrap irrational, inconsistent restrictions and develop clear, explicit policies, grounded in evidence, in their place. At the heart of this is the fight for access to information and ideas, and freedom of thought. Those aren't just rights that exist beyond prison walls-they must also prevail within them.

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The Cruel Practice of Banning Books Behind Bars

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In Florida , the list of 20,000-plus banned books includes Nutrition For Dummies and PCs For Dummies . In New Hampshire , the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy makes the list. Texas , which bans nearly 9,000 books , once counted a...

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When a student at Spring Valley High School, South Carolina captured a cellphone video of a police officer flipping over a student and her desk, then throwing the student across the room, the video quickly got national attention: people were alarmed that a police officer in a school would do that to a teenager who didn't pose a threat.

But to others, it was less surprising that a police officer would behave so aggressively in a school: because school discipline and the criminal justice system have already been intertwined, in a phenomenon civil-rights advocates call the "school-to-prison pipeline." Especially for older students, trouble at school can lead to their first contact with the criminal justice system. And in many cases, schools themselves are the ones pushing students into the juvenile justice system - often by having students arrested at school by School Resource Officers like the one in Spring Valley.

Juvenile crime rates are plummeting, and the juvenile incarceration rate dropped 41 percent between 1995 and 2010. But school discipline policies are moving in the opposite direction: out-of-school suspensions have increased about 10 percent since 2000. They have more than doubled since the 1970s. And it's hardly racially balanced: Black students are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students, according to the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, and research in Texas found students who have been suspended are more likely to be held back a grade and drop out of school entirely.

Here's how the current state of school discipline developed and why some districts and federal officials are working to change the status quo.

1) Concerns about crime led schools to adopt 'zero tolerance' policies

In the 1970s, keeping students out of school as a punishment was relatively rare: fewer than 4 percent of students were suspended in 1973, according to an analysis of Education Department data by the Southern Poverty Law Center. But growing concern about crime and violence in schools led states and districts to adopt policies that required students to be suspended.

The Gun-Free Schools Act, passed in 1994, mandated a yearlong out-of-school suspension for any student caught bringing a weapon to school. And as states began adopting these zero-tolerance policies, the number of suspensions and expulsions increased. The suspension rate for all students has nearly doubled since the 1970s, and has increased even more for black and Hispanic students.

Zero-tolerance policies have been widely criticized when schools have interpreted "weapon" very broadly, expelling students for making guns with their fingers or chewing a Pop-Tart into a gun shape or bringing a camping fork for Cub Scouts to class.

But they're not the only reason schools suspended students more frequently. At the same time as zero-tolerance policies for violence were growing, school districts adopted their own version of the broken windows theory of policing. The broken windows theory emphasizes the importance of cracking down on small offenses in order to make residents feel safer and discourage more serious crimes; in schools, it translated into more suspensions for offenses that previously hadn't warranted them - talking back to teachers, skipping class, or being otherwise disobedient or disruptive.

At the same time, administrators started relying more heavily on actualpolice - in the form of School Resource Officers (SROs) stationed in schools. From 1997 to 2007, the number of SROs increased by nearly a third. Ostensibly, they were there to prevent mass school shootings like the one at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1998 - in other words, to protect students, not to police them.

But as often happens with law enforcement, resources that are supposed to be used for a rare occurrence often get used for more common occurrences simply because they're there. About 92,000 students were arrested in school during the 2011-2012 school year, according to US Department of Education statistics. And most of those are low-level violations: 74 percent of arrests in New York City public schools in 2012, according to a report published by the state courts, were for misdemeanors or civil violations.

2) Schools have outsourced discipline to juvenile courts and officers in schools

When a school allows a School Resource Officer to arrest a student - or, less drastically and more commonly, refers a student to law enforcement or juvenile court as a form of discipline - they're turning that student over to the juvenile justice system. That makes it that much easier for a student to get a juvenile record (so even if punishment for a first offense is light, punishment for a second offense is likely to be much harsher).

This happens way more at schools with officers. A report by the Justice Policy Institute found that, even controlling for a school district's poverty level, schools with officers had five times as many arrests for "disorderly conduct" as schools without them.

This isn't something that the juvenile court system is calling for - quite the opposite. The chief judge of the juvenile court in Clayton County, Georgia has become an outspoken opponent of police in schools and the school-to-prison pipeline after placing cops on school grounds resulted in eleven times as many students getting sent to juvenile court. He told Congress at a 2012 hearing that "the prosecutor's attention was taken from the more difficult evidentiary and 'scary' cases-burglary, robberies, car thefts, aggravated assaults with weapons - to prosecuting kids that are not 'scary,' but made an adult mad."

The Department of Education only started collecting detailed data on arrests and referrals for the last two iterations of its Office for Civil Rights report. So it's hard to be confident about trends. But there's some evidence that arrests and referrals are on the decline; referrals to law enforcement of students without disabilities, for example, went down about 9 percent between 2009-10 and 2011-12.

3) Black students are more likely to be disciplined

Black students are suspended or expelled three times more frequently than white students. And while black children made up 16 percent of all enrolled children in 2011-12, according to federal data, they accounted for 31 percent of all in-school arrests.

The disparity begins in preschool: 48 percent of preschool children suspended more than once are black. And students with disabilities are also suspended more frequently than students without disabilities. This, too, can have a racial component. One 2014 study by a Columbia University researcher found that five-year-old boys whose fathers had been incarcerated were substantially less behaviorally "ready" for school than five-year-olds whose fathers hadn't been incarcerated - making them more likely to be placed in special-education classes for their behavioral disabilities.

Several studies have looked at the relationship between race, behavior, and suspension, and none have them have proven that black students misbehave at higher rates. A study in 2002 found that white students were more likely to be disciplined for provable, documentable offenses - smoking, vandalism, and obscene language - while black students were more likely to be disciplined for more subjective reasons, such as disrespect.

Schools with more black students tend to have higher rates of suspension, researchers have found. There's a 2010 study by researchers at Villanova University that showed the punitiveness of a school's discipline policy was positively correlated with the percentage of its students that were black. It wasn't correlated with students' rates of juvenile delinquency or drug use.

A landmark study of Texas discipline policies found that 97 percent of school suspensions were the choice of school administrators. Only 3 percent of students had broken rules that made suspension a required punishment, such as carrying a weapon to school. And those discretionary suspensions fell particularly hard on black students: they were 31 percent more likely to receive a discretionary suspension, even after controlling for 83 other variables.

Many discretionary suspensions and arrests are for tough-to-define offenses, like "insubordination" or "willful defiance," which can just mean a student has challenged the authority of a teacher or school administrator. In California, for example, 40 percent of all suspensions during the 2010-11 school year were for "willful defiance" - which a US Department of Education official defined in 2012 as "any behavior that disrupts a classroom." "Insubordination" was the most common cause of suspension in New York City public schools in 2013-14.

Unsurprisingly, there's a racial disparity in suspensions for nebulous offenses like these: in 2006-2007 (the last year data appears to be readily available) in New York City, 51 percent of students suspended for "profanity" were black, and 57 percent of students suspended for "insubordination." Even arrests by SROs are often for vague reasons: in New York in 2012, one of every six arrests in schools was for "resisting arrest" or "obstructing governmental administration" after the student had been in a conflict with an officer.

4) Even when schools aren't deliberately sending children into the juvenile justice system, disciplining them makes it more likely they'll end up there

Students who are suspended are more likely to repeat a grade or drop out than students who were not. The Texas study, considered the most thorough analysis of school discipline policies and their effects, looked at data from every seventh-grader in the state in 2000, 2001, and 2002, then tracked their academic and disciplinary records for six years. They found that 31 percent of students who were suspended or expelled repeated a grade, compared with only 5 percent of students who weren't.

It's hard to prove causation; it's possible that students who misbehave would have ended up in academic trouble no matter how they were punished. But the Texas study found that students who had been suspended or expelled were twice as likely to drop out compared to students with similar characteristics at similar schools who had not been suspended.

Students who are disciplined by schools are also more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system. The Texas study found that, of students disciplined in middle or high school, 23 percent of them ended up in contact with a juvenile probation officer. That figure stands at 2 percent among those not disciplined. And students who have been suspended or expelled are three times more likely to come into contact with the juvenile probation system the following year than one who wasn't.

It's hard to prove that suspensions causedelinquency in the same way they cause poor educational outcomes. But researchers argue that just as out-of-school suspensions or expulsions don't do anything to improve a student's academic standing, they don't do anything to monitor his behavior or improve his safety, either.

5) The Education Department is pushing schools to change their discipline policies

The Obama administration has opened investigations into the civil rights implications of schools' discipline policies, and urged schools to restructure their discipline systems so that expulsion and suspension are a last resort.

But this effort, by the Education Department and the Department of Justice, has been controversial because the guidance is based on "disparate impact." Even if a policy doesn't mention race and is applied equally to students of all races, the federal government says schools shouldn't use it if the consequences fall disproportionately on students of a particular race. For example, if a school had a policy that all students who were caught using cell phones in class got an out-of-school suspension, and that school ended up suspending a disproportionate number of Latino students as a result of the policy, the federal government would urge the school to figure out if there was another way to achieve the same goal (a cell phone-free classroom) without removing students from the classroom.

Some conservatives argue that schools will become disorderly if teachers and administrators feel that they aren't able to remove disruptive students from the classroom.

6) Some school districts are taking the matter into their own hands

Even before the Obama administration issued that guidance, though, some school districts were acting on their own. Some of the nation's largest districts are working to punish students in ways that don't involve suspension, trying to reform discipline so that students aren't referred to police, or both.

In Clayton County, Georgia, for example, where referrals from schools were overwhelming juvenile prosecutors, the juvenile courts made an agreement with the police force and the school district, restricting the cases in which police were allowed to arrest students in school or refer them to court. The agreement had a huge impact in schools: the high-school graduation rate increased by 24 percent from 2004 to 2010, beating the national average.

Meanwhile, some large school districts are moving away from zero tolerance policies. Broward County, Florida, one of the largest school districts in the country, decided in 2013 that schools, not police, would deal with students' nonviolent misdemeanors. The Chicago Public Schools are trying to reduce the number of suspensions, softening a policy under which students could be suspended for using a cell phone in school and ending suspensions for children younger than second grade, among other changes. In Los Angeles, children under 13 won't be referred to police for minor offenses, after police issued 552 tickets to preteens during the 2013-14 school year.

New York City schools are taking a more targeted approach. The city recently unveiled proposals to overhaul its school discipline code. If the changes go into effect, school principals will have to get the city Department of Education's permission to suspend any student for "insubordination," or for any suspension of a student in third grade or younger. And it would no longer be possible to give "superintendent's suspensions" (a more serious level of suspension) to students involved in "minor physical altercations."

Other schools are exploring restorative justice programs, which focus on forming relationships between teachers, students, and administrators and giving students an opportunity to resolve problems by talking about them. The Oakland School District has been testing this approach for 10 years and recently decided to expand it districtwide after schools using restorative justice reported that their suspension rates were cut in half.

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Police officers in classrooms are just the tip of the iceberg

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The password is: consider

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Teach Like a Champion 3.0: 63 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College

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Teachers can take steps to create a positive classroom culture before school even begins that will pay off throughout the year.

Your classroom can be a place where students (and you!) enjoy being and learning. Building community while creating a safe learning environment helps keep students engaged in learning with each other. Here are a few ideas on fostering positive relationships that have worked well for me.

Before Students Arrive

Learn as much as you can about your students ahead of time. Have a system that allows you quick access to educational plans along with a place to log communication, and write notes about what helps particular students find success.

Open the door of communication. Send a note to students and parents welcoming them to your class, giving any necessary information, and sharing your excitement for the year. Keep it short and straightforward. This also means that your first communication home is positive!

Label your classroom. Write your name, classroom number, and subject next to the door, and post it in the front of the room. I found a Bitmoji template online and used it to create a poster with pictures about my interests, which sparked conversations with students.

Create a seating system. I have found that having a seating chart on the first day of school eases students' anxiety about where to sit and allows me to start to learn names right away. Having numbers on the desks creates a way to easily group students, assign roles, and allow for students to move around the room, to get supplies and/or work in small groups.

First Day of School

Greet your students at the door. Smiling is highly encouraged.

Introduce yourself. Share pictures and go over any essential information about your class and expectations.

Play a name game. Students must learn each other's names to build community and have everyone feel seen in the classroom. Whatever game you pick, remember to have clear instructions visible and to model the game while students are all still seated.

One idea is to put students in small groups (again, the numbered seating system can be helpful) and have each group stand in a circle, tossing a soft object around. They need to list everyone who has had the object and call out the name of the next person before tossing it to them. The game continues until everyone has been named. If groups finish quickly, you can add another object to toss or have students add their favorite animal to their name. Eventually, you can start combining groups to learn more names.

First Week of School

Balance community-building activities with subject matter. This keeps the focus on creating an engaged, positive learning environment.

Have a brief conversation with each student. This creates a positive connection and helps set the tone for the year. Use their survey from the first day as a conversation starter. Check in on how students are doing and acknowledge any education plans in place or ways you can support them.

Remember to take your cues from students and never force communication. Let them know you care about their success, are here for them, and are happy they're in your class. This is paramount for having a strong base when/if behaviors come up throughout the year. (For more information about this strategy, check out " The Power of a 45-Second Investment in Relationship Building.")

Establish norms and class expectations. As a classroom community, think through what you want the learning environment to look and feel like. There are many different ways to do this, and whatever you come up with, be sure to clearly post, reinforce, and revisit these norms and expectations.

Be proactive. Teach and review procedures, guidelines, and expectations for every activity. It may feel redundant, but giving simple, straightforward instructions (verbal and written) can alleviate disruptive behaviors. If everyone knows what's going on, what to expect, and what to do, students feel safer, are more engaged, and become positive contributing members to the classroom community.

Play 4 Corners. Use labeled corners (1-4) in your classroom to give students four options to choose from, discuss, and share out. To organize this, I use a Google slideshow with a diagram of the corners and choices with a timer embedded in the slide.

For example, I ask students to choose a season they enjoy (1: Winter; 2: Spring; 3: Summer; 4: Autumn), go to that corner, find an elbow partner (or group of 3), and ask each person to give their name and share their reason. After one minute of discussion, I pick a student from each corner to share what they said or heard (or they can pick a volunteer from their group to speak).

Play "How Well Do You Know Your Teacher?." This could be in the form of a Kahoot, a Jeopardy-type game, a worksheet, or any game you can think of. It's fun for students to get to know who you are as a person, and the more interesting, school-appropriate facts they know, the easier it is to connect with a wider range of students over shared interests.

One suggestion for this and other activities is to consistently use random groupings. This helps students learn each other's names more quickly and get comfortable working with others.

Use a people match activity. Using a people match activity gets students out of their seats, talking to each other and making connections over similarities. Encourage students to have conversations with each other while doing this activity. Students can keep the paper to remember what they had in common.

After the excitement of the first weeks of school winds down, remember that it's never too late for students to learn names and make connections with each other. Building in brief icebreaker activities will keep students engaged in learning and growing. The purpose of all these activities is to humanize each member of the classroom community (including you), which makes the overall learning experience safer, kinder, and more positively engaging.

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Building Community Before the First Day of Middle School and Beyond

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Teachers can take steps to create a positive classroom culture before school even begins that will pay off throughout the year.

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Three Steps to Mastering Multiplication Facts (1)

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The American Dream and Public Schools Introduction (Hoschild, 2003) (1)

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Student Social Class and Teacher Expectations