Teachers' Training Program

Teacher training is an integral component of LUMS Math Circles' math outreach. Working directly with classroom teachers, we build the pedagogical skills, confidence, and curriculum-linked resources that let great mathematics teaching reach far more students than we could ever reach alone.

Our Philosophy

Our training is rooted in the NRICH philosophy of Nurturing Successful Mathematicians, and modeled after the "Rope Model" (Kilpatrick et al., 2001, Adding It Up: Helping Children Learn Mathematics): mathematical proficiency as five interwoven strands, inseparable and mutually reinforcing.

• Conceptual Understanding — comprehension of mathematical ideas, operations, and relations

• Procedural Fluency — skill in carrying out procedures accurately and efficiently

• Strategic Competence — the ability to formulate, represent, and solve problems

• Adaptive Reasoning — the capacity to think logically, explain, justify, and prove

• Productive Disposition — a habitual inclination to see mathematics as sensible, useful, and worthwhile, paired with a belief in one's own capacity to do it

Every workshop, whichever format, is built around rich, curriculum-linked, low-floor/high-ceiling problems and games designed to help teachers create classrooms where students think like mathematicians, rather than simply follow procedures.

Three Training Models

We tailor delivery to what a school, department, or fellowship program actually needs; from a single afternoon to a full week.

Five-Day Residential/Intensive Training
Our flagship format, delivered over five consecutive days, one core mathematical strand per day: Numbers & Operations, Algebra & Counting, Geometry & Measurements, Fractions & Ratios, and Probability & Data. Each day runs on a consistent rhythm: reflection, curriculum-linked problem-solving, a session on developing mathematical thinking among students, and a closing reflection on bringing that excitement into the classroom. This is the model behind our Gilgit-Baltistan Education Fellows training and our LUMS summer workshops.

Three-Day Training: "Rethinking the Mathematics Classroom"
A focused course for Secondary and Higher Secondary teachers built around one question: how do you move a classroom from performance to genuine engagement? Over three days, teachers work through defining concept-focused lesson objectives, recognizing and addressing students' math anxiety, building a classroom environment that welcomes curiosity and productive struggle, and using puzzles and mathematical stories to make abstract ideas stick. No prior experience required.

One-Day / Short-Format Training
A condensed, high-impact format for schools that want an introduction to interactive math pedagogy without a multi-day commitment, built around three components: engaging pedagogy and conceptual clarity, facilitating active learning and problem-solving, and designing effective assessments that measure real understanding rather than memorization. This format scales from a focused 2.5 to 3-hour campus session up to a full training day, depending on what the school needs.

Where We've Worked

• Gilgit-Baltistan Education Fellows (2024–2025): around 700 teachers

• Government School Teachers, South Punjab (2025): around 75 teachers

• Hyderabad & Sindh Division (2024–2025): around 300 teachers

• Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (2025): around 150 teachers

These workshops were conducted in collaboration with Provincial Education Departments. Our networking collaborator is the Pakistan Alliance for Math and Science (PAMS). These outreach activities have been exclusively funded by the Babar Ali Foundation.

We've also hosted teachers at LUMS itself, through summer training workshops for Government School teachers from Sindh and South Punjab (2025) and from Balochistan (2026), each a full five-day program. And we've taken shorter formats directly to school campuses: a three-hour session at Aitchison School and College (2026), a three-hour session at Crescent School (2026), and a full-day session at Adabistan-e-Sofiyah (2026).