Grad+Seminar+Math+Ed

__** MEETING AGENDA DRAFT **__ 1) (10-11:30) How can we most effectively help, support, and encourage precollege math faculty to explore critical issues related to learning and teaching in math classrooms?

a. substance: what ARE the critical issues/elements to explore? b. process: what approaches could we use to connect faculty to those issues and structure thoughtful and collegial explorations linked to classroom practice in a meaningful and ongoing way?

This 2-part question is a slightly broader variation on the question I included in my 12/16 email and sent to Ginger Warfield: "If we were going to produce a curriculum for dev ed math teachers addressing critical learning they need around math instruction, student learning, and classroom assessment in order to improve student engagement in mathematics and deepen student understanding of mathematics, what would be involved—specifically, what issues/topics would be addressed and what resources would be referenced/used?" My intent in re-framing our working question is to avoid assuming a "yes" answer to Diane's question to me, "Is this [presumably, developing a math ed grad seminar for 2-year college math faculty] really the way we want to go?" Regardless of what we decide in terms of our approach, I think the following additional questions are worth considering on the 25th:

2) (11:30-12:15) What are some key resource materials (readings, presentations, web sites, existing models, etc.) that could help faculty grapple with the core issues we've proposed?

3) (12:15-1:00) How do we proceed from here: who does what, what's the timetable, etc.?

My guess is that Diane's thorny and central question, "What actually ever motivates people to want to change? What are the steps to change?”, will find its way inevitably into our discussion, especially in the first section, which is fine, but let's just be careful not to get bogged down there, as that conversation could spin in place for quite awhile if we let it! :-)

SOME POSSIBLE RESOURCES/THINGS TO CONSIDER:

Here’s yet another Gates-funded effort, the [|Measures of Effective Teaching] Project. One of their partners is the [|Learning Mathematics for Teaching project at the University of Michigan], and one of the rubrics they used for classroom observation is the [|Mathematical Quality of Instruction] []  I expect you’ve heard of the “Khan Academy” but you may not have looked at it lately; thanks to the media attention he’s gotten grants from multiple sources and has expanded the offerings considerably, including partnering with the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education< [] > (MITE) to add a growing library of “worked problems” to go along with the instructional vignettes already on the site. There’s nothing fancy about Khan Academy, and I’m personally a bit underwhelmed by the basic pedagogical framework, but I’m hard pressed to say what’s different, or “better” about what the majority of dev math teachers are doing in their classrooms every day—and this material is free and can be paused and/or replayed as many times as you want!

[] National Repository of Online Courses  MITE is also involved in this work; they are currently working on their dev math courses, but you can see what their work looks like by following the link to the high school algebra course and then clicking on the “demo” link (it then opens up in Moodle< [] >. Right now their free course materials are available through what they call Hippocampus< [] >; check out the algebra link to see what those materials look like.

**//iTunes U //** if you have iTunes on your computer and haven’t checked out iTunes U before, you should do so; iTunes is a free download and you don’t even have to have a Mac! J  Quite a few colleges and universities of all shapes and sizes, including a few 2-year colleges, have their own “channels” there with quite a bit of free educational resources and in many cases full free courses, including math.

I’ve posted below a number of links to sites for projects we either talked about at our meeting or that I think might have available some resources relevant to the work we’re exploring.

[]  This is the page for the meeting that Emily, Gillies and I attended and heard Mark Milliron from the Gates Foundation speak; his slides are not posted on that page yet for some reason, but if you [|check here] you’ll see a variation of the same talk that makes many of the same points…

[] This is the web page for another conference the 3 of us attended (we actually don’t hang out together as much as it seems, though J ) at Teachers College in NYC on developmental education; see the downloads page for a number of valuable papers and presentations, especially the “student progression” brief by Bailey et al—Gillies referenced this in our discussion--and the excellent papers from Grubb and Treisman in the “Pedagogy and classroom strategies” section)

[] (follow the “Our Research” link to a series of excellent commissioned papers that are potential resources/readings, especially the ones by Carol Dweck, Deb Ball, Susan Goldberger, and Sol Garfunkel)

[] <span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"> Carnegie Foundation Statway/Mathway projects for developmental mathematics (and if you haven’t seen it, there’s a link there to a very interesting paper from Jim Stigler, but here’s a direct link: [|“What Community College Developmental Math Students Understand about Mathematics”)]

<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">[] <span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"> Brief student-produced video of an early pilot of the Statway work (course taught by Myra Snell at Los Medanos College in CA, one of the key leaders in the statewide work there around precollege reforms--here's a video of her talking about the key role of faculty learning in this work: [] )

<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">http://dm-live.wikispaces.com/ <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">AMATYC's developmental math wiki for material and resources around what used to be the "New Life" curriculum--given the Carnegie Statway/Mathway work the future of this AMATYC effort is unclear

<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">[] <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Jan can speak to this project and what kind of resource it might be for us in this work.

<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">[] <span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">[|Noyce Foundation] -sponsored website; lots of good resources (check out the “public lessons” in the classroom videos section, especially), mostly geared to K-12 math

<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">[] <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">University of Texas Dana Center site with a wide range of resources for math teachers, including lessons and high-quality tasks; didn’t see any videos, though

<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">[] <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Hosted by Drexel University—offers fairly pricey online courses for math teachers, again mostly geared to K-12, I think

<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">[] <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">A series of “college-level” courses from the Annenberg Foundation on various areas of math, from measurement to functions and algebra, geared to elementary and middle school teachers

<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">[] <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">WATOTOM’s (Washington Teachers of Teachers of Mathematics) newish web site

<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">[] <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Math Education Collaborative—Ruth Parker’s organization here in Washington, offering professional development courses for math teachers (mostly K-12, though Debra Olson from Spokane Falls took one last summer and was quite impressed)

<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">[] <span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"> A brief description of a conference session led by [|Tom Carey] about a learning repository he’s working on specifically targeted to developmental math, building from the work of regional math networks he’s leading in CA and Toronto—the repository will be held on the [|Curriki platform] as I understand it

<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">[] Connexions <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">This is the platform that I think that we’ll be using to “store” the results of the Open Course Library work currently underway in our system.

<span style="font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">[] <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">WWU’s certificate program in teaching in community and technical colleges--I’ve considered this program as a possible vehicle we might use eventually if we decided it was feasible to offer something more formal to folks; I think Stan Goto, the program director, might be open to it but I haven’t had any conversations with him at this point as it’s way premature.

Seattle U's Post-Master's in Community College Teaching: []

And one last side note of sorts: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about technology, games, digital learning, etc. and math--James Paul Gee’s work ( see [] and [] ) and [|Melissa Gresalfi] (one of the architects of [|Quest Atlantis] ), among many others. The New York Times  published an article this week ( [|Connecting Gaming and Game Design Principles to Education] )  on this subject, making me think the issue is growing even more rapidly in visibility than I thought it was. Here are TED Talks from 2 people cited in that article:

Tom Chatfield ( [] and    Jane McGonigal ( [] <span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">(Check out her web site as well: [], especially the articles “The Engagement Economy”) <span style="color: #1f497d; font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">and another from Conrad Wolfram: []

<span style="color: #632423; font-family: 'Calibri','sans-serif'; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">I’m inherently skeptical about evangelists of any sort, and I’m not suggesting there’s a panacea here, but I’ve done enough video gaming myself to be fascinated by the issues raised: there’s no question an extraordinary number of people are highly engaged and motivated by gaming environments, but many of the same people are “bored” and unmotivated in educational settings, especially math—what can we learn from the principles of game design that could be incorporated or approximated in math learning environments? That __might__ include [|actual games] in some situations, but it’s more about adapting the core principles than about designing math games…