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Higher education faculty benefit from participating in communities of practice focused on developing and improving their own instruction. However, collaborators with common interests are not always located at the same physical location. In this article, we share how participation in a technology-facilitated lesson study provided the means for five higher education faculty across the U.S. to engage in professional development and evolve into a virtual community of practice. Through the use of synchronous and asynchronous communication technology, we formulated goals, planned a common lesson, conducted research on our students’ learning, and reflected on our own teaching practice. For this paper, we share how the process of technology-facilitated lesson study provided professional learning for us as individuals.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers were faced with the insurmountable task of changing teaching methods to virtual online pedagogy, practically overnight, that continued to provide students with quality instruction using best practices. Action research was employed to help seek the answers to the question: During a pandemic with school online and students socially distanced in person simultaneously, how could teachers still provide cooperative learning experiences that give students opportunities to collaborate in class while continuing to use best practices like the 4Cs (communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity)? Through completely online and synchronous (online and face-to-face) instruction, Jamboard, Padlet, Mentimeter, Flipgrid, and Bitmoji Classroom were implemented to support student learning through the 4Cs of 21st century learning. In this chapter, the rationale, implementation, successes, and challenges will be revealed from self-examined action research.

This chapter focuses on a group of mathematics teacher educators across the state of Texas that utilized collaboration before and during a global pandemic in order to examine and apply equity issues in their own instruction and delivery of their mathematics methods courses. The authors will highlight and share how the use of collaboration that initiated with the focus on rethinking equity practices in methods courses morphed into a supportive environment that helped the group of mathematics teacher educators through a difficult transition in education due to COVID-19. The goal of the chapter is to urge educators to use collaboration as an impetus for professional development and establishing communities of practice.

Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All (NCTM 2014) calls for integrating into the classroom real-world activities that connect mathematical ideas to other subjects and contexts. Motivated by the desire to make these connections, Gupta and Dick devised a paper airplane design task to engage students in various STEM concepts. The challenge is to design a paper airplane that could fly the fastest or the farthest. The overall goal of the task was to motivate students to think about design, materials, and weight distribution as they fabricated and experimented with paper airplanes.

The current research sought to examine the impact of a week-long mathematics camp on motivation and self-efficacy beliefs of participating middle school students. Middle school students participated in a one-week mathematics camp on a college campus, where they worked on authentic mathematics activities that were applied to real world concepts. The activities were developed by a mathematics educator and were facilitated by trained college students. Middle school students responded to the Sources of Self-Efficacy measure before and after the mathematics camp to determine whether changes occurred in various motivational variables resulting from their participation in the camp. Parallel t-tests indicated significant positive changes in students’ vicarious experiences and mastery goals to suggest that participation in the camp may have caused students to feel more confident in their ability to work through math problems and to adopt learning goals for mastering mathematics content. Providing middle school students with informal learning experiences in mathematics may help them in creating long-term goals for their learning.

Teaching is a complex endeavor which requires teachers to make decisions based on children’s thinking. Pre-service teachers (PSTs) training to be future teachers need experiences to increase their ability to notice, understand, and analyze children’s responses/work to make sense of children’s mathematical thinking. This chapter examines elementary PSTs’ skills to recognize, identify, and make instructional decisions in their teacher preparation programs when provided with opportunities to engage in noticing practices in their mathematics methods courses. Qualitative analysis using open coding was used to analyze data sets collected from three different universities across the U.S. to find commonalities and themes. Results of the study provide insight into the effectiveness of the instructional activities and PSTs’ next-step instructional decisions.

This chapter features four full-length lesson plans designed to address the main strands of mathematics as highlighted in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for Mathematics and in the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (NCTM 2000). The lessons and activities presented in this chapter aim to develop understanding in data analysis, numbers and operations, algebraic thinking, and geometric concepts.

This chapter is about some of the benefits of incorporating movement into the Mathematics curriculum. The authors offer several activities aligned to the five significant Mathematics areas or strands represented in Common Core Standards that effectively integrate movement into Mathematics to benefit both student learning and physical activity. The Mathematics content areas included in this chapter are: numbers and operations, measurement, data analysis, algebra, and geometry.

Recent explorations in the field of human computer interaction has led to innovations in the area of intelligent tutoring systems. Prior computer systems that have tried to “tutor” users have failed, since they could not replace a human teacher. Emotional intelligence, however, can be incorporated into such systems for better assistance. To accomplish this, concepts of emotion recognition must be integrated into an intelligent tutoring system. Such a system could deliver a course in different teaching styles, so the student can easily understand the course material. Also, a more sophisticated tutoring avatar could be developed, which would adopt a better teaching style for a particular subject and then change the style dynamically according to emotional feedback given by the student. Based on response time, facial expressions or feedback obtained by a few questions, analysis can be made and the interface can be changed according to the needs of the user. This paper proposes an emotionally intelligent tutoring system (EITS), which could be used to detect and analyze the emotional state of a learner and respond in a way similar to human tutors.

This study examines the effect varying models have on student understanding of fractions. The study addressed the question of what students know and understand about fractional concepts through the use of discrete and continuous models. A sample of 54 students in kindergarten and 3rd grade were given an interview pretest, participated in teacher-led classroom instruction with a series of six research-based lessons, and then were given a posttest. The purpose was to examine the use of discrete and continuous models and the impact on student understanding of fractions. A mixed-methods approach was utilized, with descriptive statistics discussed relative to quantitative pre/post data. Qualitative data were collected in the form of observer notes, teacher reflections, and anecdotal assessment. A case study approach was taken to examine findings within and across grade levels. Major findings include (1) students demonstrated growth in understanding of fractions with both models; (2) students generally understo...