The Tutor Training Project

This project, which began in the fall of 2018, is part of an effort to support future teachers in developing the skills to help students with learning disabilities be successful in Algebra 1. We are interested in developing the capacity of pre-service teachers to accomplish two interrelated goals: to use gesturing in combination with written representations to reduce the demands on students' working memory; and to pose questions that will help students develop conceptual understanding through conversations about their work. Prior work of ours and others has suggested that gesturing to help students with learning disabilities organize written representations can help students overcome cognitive overload and create more space for the development of conceptual understanding.

The project will run through 2021, and we expect to develop a collection of resources that might be used for training pre-service teachers, as well as examples of productive interactions between students and pre-service teachers. This website is a place where we will share those resources, as well as outcomes of our research.