Roundtables

Fawn Nguyen is the Director of STEM Initiatives at Amplify, following a 30-year career teaching middle school math and coaching educators. An award-winning educator and international speaker, she serves on the Mathematics Project Leadership Team at UC Santa Barbara and founded resources like visualpatterns.org and the Math Teachers’ Circle in Thousand Oaks. Fawn also writes a teaching blog on Substack and is known for her leadership in math education.

Jennifer M. Bay-Williams is a mathematics teacher educator at the University of Louisville and a nationally recognized leader in K–12 math education. She’s the author of influential books like Elementary and Middle School Mathematics: Teaching Developmentally and the Figuring Out Fluency series, and has served on the boards of NCTM and TODOS. Bay-Williams continues to work directly with teachers and students, supporting math fluency and strong mathematical identities across the country.

Sue O’Connell has spent many years working in elementary schools as a teacher, math coach, reading specialist, and school improvement leader. She is a popular speaker and consultant who explains teaching strategies in a clear and practical way. Sue focuses on helping teachers build students’ math thinking skills. She is the lead author of the Math in Practice and Math by the Book series, as well as other books about teaching math to young children. She also created learning centers for hand2mind that help students practice math in meaningful ways. Sue often speaks at math conferences across the country.

Dr. Yeap Ban Har, primary author of the think!Mathematics curriculum joined us to discuss enrichment and acceleration.

The grand question asked in the session: How do we create and implement tasks for thin-slicing?