Spring & Summer Fun: Updated Teacher Professional Learning Workshops

If you are interested in the intersection of arts, math and learning you will want to try and make it to one of the following teacher workshops, for sure.  If my itinerary this spring and summer ends up not including your geographic location, then let's do something about that! Feel free to get in touch any time to talk about how to make a Math in Your Feet or Math by Design teacher workshop happen in your area.

Here's what's set so far:

Thursday, April 10, 2014
4:00pm to 7:00pm, Clowes Memorial Hall, Butler University, Indianapolis, IN
Three hours of dig-in, hands-on experience with the the core Math in Your Feet lessons. $30 workshop fee. Participants leave with a comprehensive workshop packet, a link to the classroom materials packet, and new understanding of how you can make math and dance at the same time. More info on the workshop can be found here.

June 16-18, 2014
Richland Institute for Professional Learning, Union College, KY. 
Three full days of hands-on learning integrating math and the arts! Four teaching artists will provide a range of math/art combinations for use in the classroom.  I will be providing a comprehensive program that includes three hours of teacher workshops with an additional three hours of work with kids. After your workshop with me, you then get a chance to observe and assist me in the student workshops so you can see how it all plays out with real live kids. There are three separate tracks for primary, intermediate, and middle/high school teachers and a number of artistic mediums represented.  Awesome.

July 24-27, 2014
Twitter Math Camp, Tulsa, OK.
Embodied Mathematics: Tools, Manipulatives, and Meaningful Movement in Math Class, 2-hour sessions over three mornings, Co-presenting with Christopher Danielson, and make sure to read his post on our session!

This workshop is for anyone who uses, or is considering using, physical objects in math instruction at any grade level.  This three-part session asks participants to actively engage with the following questions:

1. What role(s) do manipulatives play in learning mathematics?
2. What role does the body play in learning mathematics?
3. What does it mean to use manipulatives in a meaningful way? and
4. “How can we tell whether we are doing so?”

In the first session, we will pose these questions and brainstorm some initial answers as a way to frame the work ahead. Participants will then experience a ‘disruption of scale’ moving away from the more familiar activity of small hand-based tasks and toward the use of the whole body in math learning.  At the base of this inquiry are the core lessons of the Math in Your Feet program.

In the second and third sessions, participants will engage with more familiar tasks using traditional math manipulatives. Each task will be chosen to highlight useful similarities and contrasts with the Math in Your Feet work, and to raise important questions about the assumptions we hold when we do “hands on” work in math classes.

The products of these sessions will be a more mindful approach to selecting manipulatives, a new appreciation for the body’s role in math learning, clearer shared language regarding “hands-on” inquiry for use in our professional relationships and activities, and public displays to engage other TMC attendees in the conversation.

Don't all these workshops sound fascinating and fun?!  Please come and learn with us, and if you can't, let's find a way for me to come to your area!  You can get in touch via www.malkerosenfeld.com.