Professional Development: Making Math Make Sense

Karen helps teachers, interventionists, and parents make math instruction more effective and accessible for every child. Her professional development workshops, offered both in-person and online, show how to build strong foundational math skills—from pre-K through pre-algebra—by combining what we know from cognitive science with practical classroom strategies that work with any curriculum.

As co-author of How Children Learn Math: The Science of Math Learning in Research and Practice (2023), Karen reviewed thousands of studies on how children think, process, and learn math. She continues to follow current research and translate it into easy-to-use teaching methods that teachers can apply right away. Karen also uses her expertise in the language of math to reduce the language load in math instruction and modify the very abstract English math language to make math make sense.

Karen’s training is designed to help educators know how to:

• make the language of math less abstract so students can better understand math concepts.
• utilize the beautiful base-10 system of math that leads to a deeper understanding of numbers and greater ease in arithmetic
• include number lines, number charts, and spatial processing as  critical components to math success
• include concrete experience with math, meaningful diagrams and pictures, and abstract representations of the math concepts
• consistently use decomposition as the highest level of mathematical thinking
• improve math fact fluency for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division
• balance explicit instruction, modeling, targeted practice, and feedback with inquiry and discovery
• approach word problems with a variety of strategies 
• teach rational numbers including fractions, decimals and percentages with greater meaning, modified language, magnitude understanding, and deeper understanding of arithmetic operations
• include spatial skill development and why it is so important
• consider the cognitive skills children need to succeed in math, and how some common curricula’s instruction requires cognitive skills beyond what is expected for children of different ages.

• Use the base-10 system to help students understand numbers and make arithmetic easier.
• Use number lines, charts, and spatial activities as essential tools for math learning.
• Connect hands-on experiences, visuals, and abstract ideas to strengthen math concepts.
• Use number decomposition (breaking numbers apart) as a key problem-solving strategy.
• Build math fact fluency in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
• Balance direct teaching, modeling, practice, and feedback with exploration and discovery.
• Solve word problems using multiple strategies.
• Teach fractions, decimals, and percentages in ways that make sense and show meaning.
• Develop spatial skills and understand why they are important for math success.
• Foster mathematical thinking children need for each math concept and adjust instruction to match their development.