Jere Confrey

Biography:

Jere Confrey is the Joseph D. Moore Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Education at North Carolina State University. She served on the National Validation Committee on the Common Core Standards. She was Vice Chairman of the Mathematics Sciences Education Board, National Academy of Sciences (1998-2004). She chaired the NRC Committee, which produced On Evaluating Curricular Effectiveness, and was a coauthor of NRC's Scientific Research in Education. She was a co-founder of the UTEACH program for Secondary Math and Science teacher preparation program at the University of Texas in Austin, and was the founder of the SummerMath and co-founder of SummerMath for Teachers. She is the author of numerous pieces of software, led the development of www.turnonccmath.com, a website on the Common Core. Dr. Confrey received a Ph.D. in mathematics education from Cornell University.

Presentation Title:

Building Digital Curriculum for Students' Productive Struggle Using Challenges, Tools and Interactivity

Presentation Description:

In this talk, I will discuss a major component of our approach to curriculum developed in our learning trajectory-based middle grades digital curriculum. I will outline and illustrate our approach to Challenges, designed to provide students with an opportunity to engage with a concept and invent, in collaborative settings, potential strategies. Students are provided opportunities to work on the challenge tasks in rich workspaces with available tools, applets, and jumpstarts. Then during the share-out, teachers orchestrate the sharing of student strategies making full use of digital capacity to share and archive work. The talk will combine examples with a description of the process of how challenges are built, playtested, revised and piloted using agile interdisciplinary teams.