Complex Instruction:
 
“When we teach across the boundaries of race, class, or gender – indeed when we teach at all – we must recognize and overcome the power differential, the stereotypes, and the other barriers which prevent us from seeing each other.”
Lisa Delpit,
Other People’s Children: Cultural
Conflict in the Classroom
While many mathematics programs call for students to work cooperatively in heterogeneous classrooms, groupwork can produce unsatisfactory results for students and teachers. Equitable learning and engage­ment don’t happen automatically. During a Designing Groupwork in Mathematics institute, participants learn principles and practices of effective groupwork that are grounded by twenty years of extensive classroom research (Cohen et al, Complex Instruction, Stanford University).
Participants gain tools and strategies for assuring that all students – regardless their ethnic, language, socio-economic, and/or achievement backgrounds – have equal-status participation in small groups and are accountable for success on challenging learning tasks.

In a hands-on, interactive setting, participants learn to:
◆ Determine when using groups will support deep­ened math understanding
◆ Establish and maintain a positive learning environ­ment in which all students see themselves and their peers as resources
◆ Recognize and treat classroom issues of status – the underlying peer dynamic that prevents equitable inter­action and limits learning
◆ Use proven strategies and interventions that foster student responsibility for productive small group inter­action
◆ Provide students with the skills needed to achieve high quality group discourse
◆ Recognize mathematically “groupworthy” tasks in their current math curriculum materials and/or revise tasks to assure groupworthiness
◆ Design a personal Groupwork Action Plan for implementing effective groupwork in their classrooms, and have opportunity to receive yearlong follow-on support while they implement their plans