The aim of this book is to support mathematics educators – teachers, teacher educators, coaches, administrators, math-ed faculty, and researchers – with extended workshop-like experiences to support their understanding and using the TRU Framework to improve instruction.
Through the years we’ve done hundreds of workshops in partnership with teachers and districts. The goal of these workshops is a lot more than understanding TRU; it’s for teachers to learn to “think with TRU” as they plan, teach, and reflect on lessons. Much of our work consists of videotaping lessons and then discussing them together, in detail:
- How did a task play out (What riches were potentially available? Did the lesson work as intended? What changes might be made next time?)
- Did we see signs of productive struggle? (If a task was too challenging, in what ways could the students be scaffolded without “giving the game away?” If it was too easy, what extensions might be available?)
- Which students participated, in which ways? How might we open things up so that more students engaged deeply with the key ideas in the lesson?
- Which students participated, in which ways? How might we open things up so that more students engaged deeply with the key ideas in the lesson?
- In what ways was student thinking revealed, and how did instruction adjust in response to student thinking? How can we adjust this lesson to be more effective the next time it’s taught?
Our goal is to re-create these experiences as much as we can, in book form. The core of the book consists of three case studies. We’ve transcribed and described three classroom sessions in extensive detail. Then the book takes readers through them, in the same way we’d do “in person.” We focus on a small segment of instruction at a time, asking what the readers see, their opinions about options for teacher and students, and the possible consequences of various teacher moves; then we share our perspectives. As much as possible, the books format supports a dialogue between us and readers – preferably a group of readers, who use these conversations as a starting point for discussions and then explorations of their own teaching.
We expect this case study book to be published in 2023.
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