This week I had the great honor to present at the 2014 Oklahoma CareerTech Conference for STEM Education held at OSU-Tulsa. I was asked by Sara Wright, my esteemed counterpart at Career Tech, to present on my favorite free calculator, Desmos, and on the new landmark publication from NCTM, “Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematics Success for All” (2014). I could go on for days about both, but I thought I’d focus this post on the Eight Mathematics Teaching Practices (MTPs) that are laid out in Principles to Actions (P2A). This set of practices are not only impressive on their own, but they were recently included in a powerful resolution made by the Oklahoma Council of Teachers of Mathematics:
I believe this resolution shows the importance of these practices to math teachers and I think it represents a critical moments in this time of change in Oklahoma. With the Eight Mathematics Teaching Practices, we are able to focus our efforts on great mathematics teaching and to consider how we can all work together to support all of our students.
Each of the Eight Mathematics Teaching Practices are really worth having instant access to, so you can also download a super convenient and lovely visual here: large PDF and large PNG. But why should you care about them aside from the fact that NCTM, OCTM, and yours truly are huge fans? What I’d like to do is present to you each of the Practices along with the short description. Over time, I’d like to dig in a bit more to each of these Practices. For now, I’ll also include my presentation in case you don’t want to wait for the forthcoming posts.
