Professional Development: Making Math Make Sense

Karen helps teachers, interventionists, and parents make math instruction more effective and accessible for every child. Her professional development workshops, offered both in-person and online, show how to build strong foundational math skills—from pre-K through pre-algebra—by combining what we know from cognitive science with practical classroom strategies that work with any curriculum.

As co-author of How Children Learn Math: The Science of Math Learning in Research and Practice (2023), Karen reviewed thousands of studies on how children think, process, and learn math. She continues to follow current research and translate it into easy-to-use teaching methods that teachers can apply right away.

Karen’s training is designed to help educators know how to:

• Apply the base-10 system to help students understand numbers and make arithmetic easier.
• Use number lines, charts, and spatial activities as essential tools for math learning.
• Connect hands-on experiences, visuals, and abstract ideas to strengthen math concepts.
• Use number decomposition (breaking numbers apart) as a key problem-solving strategy.
• Build math fact fluency in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
• Balance direct teaching, modeling, practice, and feedback with exploration and discovery.
• Solve word problems using multiple strategies.
• Teach fractions, decimals, and percentages in ways that make sense and show meaning.
• Develop spatial skills and understand why they are essential for math success.
• Foster the mathematical thinking children need for each math concept and adjust instruction to match their development.
  
  

Karen Tzanetopoulos, M.S., CCC-SLP is co-author of the book How Children Learn Math: The Science of Math Learning in Research and Practice (Routledge, 2023). Here, Karen shares her expertise in the cognitive processes of math learning and the science of reading.