Sherry D. Parrish

Sherry D. Parrish is a mathematics educator with over 35 years of experience as a classroom teacher, university professor, and national and international speaker, focusing on teaching and learning mathematics through inquiry. She is a recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics Teaching and is often described as a “teacher of teachers,” advocating for students’ construction of their own mathematical relationships. She has written about number talks and numerical reasoning, including an article in Teaching Children Mathematics titled “Number Talks Build Numerical Reasoning,” where she outlines the what, why, and how of classroom number talks.

Parrish is the author of Number Talks: Whole Number Computation, which received the AEP Distinguished Achievement Award, and coauthor of Number Talks: Fractions, Decimals, and Percentages, which received the AEP Golden Lamp Award. She also authored Math Workshop: Five Steps to Implementing Guided Math, Learning Stations, Reflection, and More, a resource that supports teachers in implementing a math workshop model through a structured five-step process. Her work on number talks and math workshop has been widely used by teachers seeking to build students’ mental computation, number sense, and flexible numerical reasoning.