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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.

This classroom activity uses Internet tools to help teach order of operations by critiquing adults' responses to a mathematical problem on Facebook®. Contributors to the iSTEM (Integrating Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) department share ideas and activities that stimulate student interest in the integrated fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in K–grade 6 classrooms.

This article describes how Twitter can be used to engage students in mathematics both in and out of the classroom. Contributors to the iSTEM (Integrating Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) department share ideas and activities that stimulate student interest in the integrated fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in K–grade 6 classrooms.

As young learners engage in authentic STEM activities, they gain a better understanding of the complexity and adventure of scientific and mathematical inquiry and realize that a given problem may have more than one simple solution. Therefore, at K-grade 8 levels, STEM activities should emphasize the process not the solution. Here, Chesky and Wells discuss the use of 3D-printing technology that allows children to be the "makers" of their own creative designs and seek different solutions to problems.

Introduce two topics in math, volume and triangle types, by using connections to STEM. Contributors to the iSTEM (Integrating Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) department share ideas and activities that stimulate student interest in the integrated fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in K–grade 6 classrooms.

“More weight, longer shadow,” a student predicts before we begin measuring the lengths of our objects' shadows. Another third-grade student conjectures, “Standing-up objects make the shadow longer, and lying-down objects make the shadow shorter.”

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 case study describes how a beginning teacher struggled to meet her students’ needs in an ESL classroom. Her struggle demonstrated the interrelated nature of policy and practice: Policy effects in her school isolated her and made her feel solely responsible for the achievement of her newly arrived English-learning (EL) students. Her case demonstrated a critical issue in the United States: Namely, the effects of highstakes testing policies in the classroom serving ELs has led to a focus on student output (e.g., achievement scores), while discussions of input (e.g., knowledge of effective instructional practices, support across the professional life-span, and clear, coherent curriculum standards that include English-learning students) are much needed and widely absent. Further, these issues occurred in an unclear language policy environment where ideologies around bilingualism left the case study teacher confused. Ultimately, this study provokes the following questions: How do the effects of policy impact beginning teachers’ ability to negotiate and contest policy? How is a teacher’s negotiation and contestation of policy shaped by a specific policy context over time?

A key aspect of supporting teachers’ learning on a large scale concerns mathematics leaders’ practices in designing for and leading high-quality professional development. We report on a retrospective analysis of an initial design experiment aimed at supporting the learning of three math leaders who were charged with supporting the learning of middle-grades mathematics teachers across a large US school district. Initial goals for the math leaders’ learning included: (a) viewing teachers’ improvement of their classroom practices as a progression; (b) designing supports for teachers’ learning that were informed by assessments of teachers’ current practices, were oriented towards long-term goals for teachers’ practices, and would enable teachers to attain short-term goals that constituted reasonable next steps; and (c) facilitating professional development by pressing on teachers’ ideas differentially and building on their contributions. Findings suggest that the math leaders increasingly viewed teachers’ improvement of their classroom practices as a developmental progression and began to design connected sequences of activities. However, they struggled to facilitate the activities in ways that would meet their ambitious goals for teachers’ learning. Based on our findings, we indicate potential improvements to our design for supporting math leaders’ learning. More generally, we provide the field with a set of potentially revisable learning goals for math leaders’ learning, a set of principles to guide the design of supports for their learning, and a provisional design to support the development of their practices.