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Teaching Mathematics During the COVID - 19 Pandemic: Note from the Editors

We are approaching the one - year anniversary when the K - 12 schools, universities in Virginia, and the rest of the world began to close their doors due to the Covid - 19 pandemic. Teachers scrambled to shift their face - to - face teaching to an online envi ronment and, later, to a hybrid teaching model. Words like Zooming, synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid to name a few became common over the last year . The change was swift, and teachers at all grade levels, K - 16+, were thrust into a new world of teaching. To keep students ’ engagement in this new digital environment, mathematics teachers had to face a challenge of limited digital interactive mathematics content appropriate for their classes. Developing all of the digital content for their classrooms from scratch was time consuming and, in some cases, impossible. The many venues on the internet such as blogs, YouTube, webinars, and mathematics apps switched to support teachers in their heroic effort to sustain student learning. On another hand, common pedagogical practices also had to change. For ex ample, classroom management, student engage ment, parent communication practices in an online school looked very different from what was once used in a face - to - face class. Teachers now held du

al roles as learners of new teaching practices and pedagogy and doers of these new teaching practic es all at the same time. Overnight, all teachers were thrust into a massive professional development ex perience that exponentially increased their technol ogy skills and newfound online teaching skills. In this issue, we share how teachers used their new teaching and technology skills during the pandem ic, the ways that technology augmented student learning, the ways that changed how we maintained a sense of community with students and parents, and the way mathematics modeling helps us under stand the meaning of pandemic and herd immunity from a mathematics perspective. We open the issue with an article by an internation ally renowned mathematics educators, Peter Liljedahl from Simon Fraser University in Canada and his co - author Judy Larsen from the University of Fraser Valley in Canada. In their article, “ Building Thinking Classrooms Online: A Closer Look at The Types of Tasks we Use , ” the authors ground their article on Dr. Liljedahl ’ s framework that structures classroom teaching to foster student thinking. The authors explain how shifting teaching

Virginia Mathematics Teacher vol. 47, no. 1

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