Presentations & Consulting

MAKING SENSE OF MATHEMATICS  with Caty Romero   email: misscatyromero@gmail.com Twitter @catyrmath

Biography

Caty Romero is an early childhood and elementary school mathematics curriculum, instruction, and assessment instructional leader passionate about learning and teaching mathematics through the lens of inquiry, modeling, reasoning and communicating. Caty is currently the Early Childhood and Elementary School Mathematics Instructional Coach at Shanghai American School where she has been essential in the development, implementation, and transformation of the math curriculum.

Caty serves as contracted mathematics consultant at several international schools in the South East Asia region. In addition, she has facilitated workshops for international school teachers and leaders at various AASSA, NESA, EARCOS and ACAMIS regional conferences.  Caty coordinated and co-facilitated the Office of Overseas Schools sponsored Asia Regional Math Summit on Developing High-Quality Assessments in partnership with Erma Anderson. Caty has co-facilitated the Mathematics Specialists in International Schools (MSIS) certification institute focused on K-12 Geometry and Measurement with Steve Leinwand, and is currently part of the prestigious AERO Math Think Tank Team at Project AERO supported by the U.S. State Department Office of Overseas Schools.

Learning & Assessing Mathematics That Make Sense

These one-, two- or three-day workshops provide participants with the knowledge, tools, resources and strategies to provide a balanced approach to teaching, learning and assessing math in early childhood and elementary classrooms. Using current research-based approaches to learning math, participants explore the essential components of student-centered math lessons, where students demonstrate proficiency of mathematics through essential math practices including problem solving, modeling, and communicating & reasoning.

Participants explore student-centered approaches which provide students with learning experiences that allow them to move from the concrete to a pictorial representation before moving into more abstract strategies designed to solve problems where students design their solution pathways, engage in productive struggle, and connect mathematical ideas. These approaches ensure mathematics is taught in relevant, realistic contexts that make sense.

Assessments also need to match this approach to teaching and learning, so we will dive deep into developing high quality tasks that allow students to use number sense, computational thinking, and innovative tools that allow them to problem solve, model their thinking, and communicate and reason with their solutions.

Transforming your K-8th Math Program

Teaching and learning mathematics is often perceived as a difficult with the belief that there is a need to memorize abstract concepts, formulas, and procedures to solve incredibly challenging algorithms. This sounds intimidating to teachers and students.

In reality, teaching and learning math is about asking good questions that allow us to make connections between math concepts, allowing us to make sense of math, and giving us the opportunity to justify our thinking and/or solutions.

Students engage in mathematical tasks when they have real context, or a mathematical context, but related to the real world. This allows students to make sense of the problem, make it their own, and this new learning will be available for use in real life problems.

This is the difference between a program that simply covers material, and one that turns students into math thinkers.

This session addresses the following questions:

How do we start a balanced mathematics program at our school?  Detailed steps are explored to in order to support teachers.

What resources do our teachers need? Essential resources for mathematics classrooms are explored and defined.

What does it take to support our teachers as they transform their instruction and assessment of mathematics?

How do we develop assessments and performance tasks? How do we know kids are proficient in mathematics?

How do we intentionally and meaningfully include our parent community when discussing new approaches to learning math? 

Labsites!

Labsites are a great opportunity for teachers to observe and expand their thinking about teaching & learning math.  Labsites are authentic examples of our work with students, and include demonstrations of the instructional delivery learned during a workshop. It is not about showcasing, but a way to see what a student-centered approach looks like in action.

During the authentic Labsites portion of the workshop, Caty provides detailed guidance and support before, during, and after the observations.

K-8th Math Scope & Sequence and Curriculum Development

These contracted services or workshop sessions focus on leading teachers, instructional coaches, or curriculum developers through the development or revision of the school’s math scope and sequence and curricular materials. Participants will be provided with the support and expertise to develop a curriculum based on four essential areas including content, problem solving, modeling, and communicating/reasoning. This curriculum development work is rooted in the notion that learners acquire mathematical understanding by constructing their own meaning through personal experiences and through inquiry, using relevant, realistic contexts.