Place Value Playground: Building Strong Number Sense PD (Grades K-5)

UCLA Center X presents this focused professional development session on place value — a deceptively complex mathematical concept that underpins virtually every arithmetic operation students will encounter. Drawing on the UCLA Mathematics Project's thirty-five years of research and experience in transforming mathematics teaching in urban schools, this workshop takes a deep dive into how young learners actually make sense of place value and why so many students develop fragile or procedural understanding that breaks down when they encounter more complex operations. Participants explore the mathematical properties that make place value work — and discover how these same properties are essential to understanding addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division at a conceptual rather than merely procedural level. The session is grounded in Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) principles, UCLA Center X's signature approach that starts with understanding how students think mathematically and uses that understanding to design instruction that builds genuine number sense. Rather than teaching place value as an isolated topic, participants learn to weave it throughout their mathematics instruction as the unifying concept it truly is. For K-5 educators who want their students to develop robust, flexible number sense that transfers across mathematical domains, this in-person session provides the conceptual depth and practical strategies to make that happen.