Building Thinking Classrooms and other pedagogcal structures require teachers to be flexible in the moment responding to the thinking of their students, but in my experience as a consultant for 7 years, I have found teachers' own conceptual understanding of subtraction is limited to the traditional US algorithm. I am hoping to either begin or to deepen participants' ownership of various flexible strategies and also various models that can be used to make this thinking visible. In this way, teachers can be sure to be providing access to each and every student to use strategies that make sense to them and for the numbers they are asked to calculate with. After this session, participants will walk away with a deeper understanding of the operation of subtraction, how these strategies can be applied to all sets of numbers, models that can help these strategies visible, as well activities and routines they can incorporate in their classrooms to develop these understandings by their students.
