Professional Development on incorporating cognitive research and modifying math language into daily math instruction with any curriculum.

Karen provides in-person and online professional development for teachers, math interventionists, and parents on how to build foundational math skills from pre-K through pre-algebra, based on cognitive research and neurocognitive research on how children learn math as well as on research-backed ways to modify math language for greater ease of learning math. While helping to write How Children Learn Math: The Science of Math Learning in Research and Practice (2023), Karen read thousands of research articles on math learning and cognition and continues to keep up with the research each month.

In addition to research, Karen’s extensive experience helping students learn math and learn to read enriches her ability to teach educators and parents how to teach math with much greater success. Karen’s additional experience as a speech and language therapist provides a deep understanding of how language and reading are essential for math learning. The English language of math is abstract, making it harder to learn math.

Karen’s professional development incorporates varied strategies that lead to mathematical thinking and not simply memorization, using procedures that coincide with understanding concepts, incorporating mathematical reasoning, modifying language for deeper understanding, reducing the language load, and a belief that all children can learn math and develop a positive outlook about the usefulness of math in everyday life.

The following are some of the goals of her professional development. Attendees will know:

• How to modify the very abstract English language of math that results in increases in understanding math concepts
• How to utilize the beautiful base-10 system of math that leads to deeper understanding of numbers and greater ease in arithmetic
• How to include number lines, number charts, and spatial processing as  critical components to math success
• How to include concrete experience with math, meaningful diagrams and pictures, and abstract representations of the math concepts
• How to consistently use decomposition as the highest level of mathematical thinking
• How to improve math fact fluency for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division
• How to balance explicit instruction, modeling, targeted practice, and feedback with inquiry and discovery
• How to approach word problems with a variety of strategies 
• How to teach rational numbers including fractions, decimals and percentages with greater meaning, modified language, magnitude understanding, and deeper understanding of arithmetic operations
• How to include spatial skill development and why it is so important
• How to 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.