Keith Leatham and Blake Peterson along with their colleagues Laura Van Zoest from Western Michigan University and Shari Stockero from Michigan Technological University have been awarded a 4 year NSF grant entitled Leveraging MOSTs: Developing a Theory of Productive Use of Student Mathematical Thinking.
In their experience working with preservice and novice teachers, these researchers have seen many “teachable moments” go unnoticed and unused by these novice teachers.One main goal of this grant is to carefully define a teachable moment which these researchers are calling a MOST (Mathematically significant pedagogical Opening to use Student Thinking). They will then identify ways to teach teachers how to recognize these MOSTs and effectively use them to help advance the student understanding of mathematics in the classroom. To do this they will be gathering and analyzing video data from diverse mathematics classrooms around the country.