This workshop will discuss our efforts to introduce teachers of pre-secondary students (of ages 5-13) to topics of discrete mathematics. The Leadership Program in Discrete Mathematics, a program sponsored by DIMACS (the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science) and funded by the US National Science Foundation, has enabled over 50 cohorts of teachers (over 1200 teachers) to participate in 10-20 days of workshops over the past 10 years.

This workshop will engage participants in the kinds of hands-on activities that we introduce to these teachers, and will discuss the activities, how teachers respond to these activities, and how this affects what they do in their classrooms. It should be noted that these teachers typically do not have a strong mathematics background and do not have confidence in their own mathematical abilities. However, they all find that they can indeed be successful in learning mathematics, and come to understand that all of their students can also be successful.

This workshop is intended for about 30 people who are involved in the mathematical preparation of prospective and practicing pre-secondary school teachers and the development of curriculum for pre-secondary schools, as well as for pre-secondary school teachers.

This workshop will address the questions of what is discrete mathematics and why it should be introduced in pre-secondary schools. We hope to demonstrate to the participants through the workshop activities that they should encourage the inclusion of discrete mathematics at pre-secondary grade levels and in programs for prospective and practicing pre-secondary teachers because:
• Discrete mathematics provides valuable information and tools that show students the usefulness of mathematics.
• Discrete mathematics facilitates a focus on problem-solving and reasoning at all grade levels.
• Discrete mathematics offers students who have been unsuccessful in traditional school mathematics a new start in mathematics.
• Discrete mathematics offers an opportunity to generate in pre-secondary teachers a new enthusiasm for teaching mathematics in new ways.
The workshop thus discusses both a non-traditional mathematical topic for the curriculum – discrete mathematics – and the opportunities it provides for introducing an activity-based approach to teaching that facilitates the development of problem-solving and reasoning in pre-secondary classrooms.