Many of the activities in RAMP-A focused on developing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). In the PCK activities, the goal was to develop teaching practices that help teachers develop deeper understandings of how students might learn specific mathematical ideas. Thus, many of these activities involve doing tasks or having students do tasks, and then examining the student thinking behind student work and discussing ways to respond. Formative Assessment is in this category, but we also examined lesson plans, engaged in learning and lesson studies, and watched videos of actual lessons. Other categories on this page involve examining tasks for cognitive complexity, doing activities to increase our own mathematical knowledge for teaching, often to better understand the standards (such as A-SSE, functions, and A-CED), discussing how to motivate students, trying little changes in our teaching, and surfacing and discussing our beliefs about teaching and learning. Watch Lani Horn’s video (in Helpful Links) for ideas on how to foster productive discussions within your PLC.
Many of our activities focused on formative assessment, including introducing and discussing key aspects of formative assessment, analyzing student work that teachers brought, and discussing vignettes that described opportunities for formative assessment.
