Susan Jo Russell

Susan Jo Russell is a mathematics education researcher and former elementary teacher whose work focuses on children’s mathematical understanding and on how teachers learn about mathematics and students’ mathematical thinking. She spent much of her career at TERC, a nonprofit STEM education research and development organization, where she served as a senior researcher and principal scientist, co-directing the original development and second edition of the K–5 curriculum Investigations in Number, Data, and Space and the professional development series Developing Mathematical Ideas. Her formal training includes a BA from Swarthmore College, an MS from Bank Street College of Education, a CAGS from Lesley College, and an EdD from Boston University.

Russell is coauthor of But Why Does It Work?: Mathematical Argument in the Elementary Classroom, which supports teachers in integrating mathematical argument into elementary instruction. Over a career of more than four decades, she has led and contributed to numerous research and development projects in mathematics education, including work on early algebra, computational fluency with whole numbers, and student-generated representations for reasoning about operations.