The Power of Progressions: Untangling the Knotty Areas of Teaching and Lear

Discover how to replace memorized rules and tricks with rich tasks, clear reasoning, and practical strategies that build lasting fluency across grade levels. Perfect for educators of grades 3-8 who are ready to rethink how fractions are taught!

Many students and teachers approach fractions with a mix of rules, tricks, and

memorised steps. This two-day workshop begins by grounding participants in the developmental progression of how students come to understand fractions. From there, we will examine the shortcuts we often teach and uncover how to move from tricks to true reasoning. Throughout the workshop, we will emphasise the importance of building a deep conceptual understanding that supports flexible thinking, not just for one lesson or one grade, but across the entire learning journey. 

Participants will engage in rich tasks, explore student thinking, and leave with practical strategies that promote lasting understanding, fluency, and scalable thinking that grows with students year after year.

Participants will walk away with:

• A clearer understanding of how students develop fraction concepts from early ideas to more complex operations
• A progression-based lens for planning instruction that connects learning across grade levels
• Greater awareness of common tricks and shortcuts students use and why these can hinder understanding
• Confidence in explaining why fraction procedures work using models and clear reasoning
• Practical tools and visual models like number lines and area models to support student understanding
• Rich tasks that promote problem solving and reasoning while building fluency
• Strategies for making student thinking visible and using it to guide instruction
• Ideas for redesigning lessons to move from tricks to conceptual understanding
• Connections between conceptual understanding and procedural fluency that support long-term learning
• A renewed sense of clarity and purpose in teaching fractions in a way that lasts