Professional Growth … Connected or Isolated?

Over on the MATHEDCC discussion list, we have been having some difficulties … which essentially are “people declaring a strong point of view, often with negative comments towards others point of view”.

In case you do not know the history of MATHEDCC, here are the basics: A committee in AMATYC (called “Technology in Math Education”, or TiME) created an email discussion list to facilitate conversations among AMATYC members.  The actual list was hosted at various servers, and is currently at the Math Forum.  However, late last year, the AMATYC Executive Board decided to discontinue the official connection between MATHEDCC and AMATYC.

I will not use this post to elaborate on the difficulties seen on the MATHEDCC list.  The purpose of that list, and of this blog, is professional development.  I wonder — can our profession make progress for the sake of our students in the absence of a community for our interaction?  Or, stated another way, does it make any sense for us to work more-or-less individually on improving our teaching and our curriculum?

For me, there is no doubt about the answers to these questions.  If we focus on individual and disconnected progress, the results will be smaller and be at higher risk of not surviving, compared to work by connected professionals.  Shared insights and progress create a change in the profession that is not possible when we are not connected.

Clearly, a discussion list is not the only way for us to be ‘connected’ in a meaningful way; we need to employ a variety of methods to work together (including conferences & blogs).  And, having a discussion list is no guarantee that we will remain connected.  At MATHEDCC, the sense of community is suffering because we do not adhere to a few basic & shared values about our interactions.  Perhaps the email list is not the best asynchronous communication tool at this time; maybe a bulletin board would be better (and there are other methodologies as well).

What do you think?  If you agree that our work needs to be connected among the professionals in our field, do we need a new place to do that (discussion list, bulletin board, etc)?  Are you motivated to help with this work?

Those were serious questions … please provide your answers.  Thanks.

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Pathways Webinar — January 24, 2012

Our friends at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching are offering a webinar on January 24, 2012 on the “Pathways”.  See the information at http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/spotlight/webinar-updates-carnegies-work-in-developmental-math

This webinar has 5 topics listed: an update on student and faculty experiences, explanation of how faculty are contributing to the materials, the role of “productive persistence”, the use of analytics to plan, and how to get involved with this work in the future.

If you have been curious about the Pathways — Statway™ or Quantway™ — this is a great opportunity, and provides an early look at how to become involved in the work.

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Good Teachers … Bad Math??

I was in a store today buying cat food and litter (really!!), and the person in front of me at the check-out did a double take … and he asked if I still taught math.  When I said yes he said “I pass math because of you!!”  (Warm fuzzies?)  At that point, the cashier said “Where was he when I was taking math?”  (Cold pricklies?)

Part of today’s educational climate is the push to evaluate teachers, especially in K-12 settings, partially based on student academic performance.  Those who produce higher levels of improvement, or absolute performance, are rewarded with good evaluations; those who do not produce run the risk of being dismissed.  This obsession with evaluation has not reached colleges (yet), though I am really looking forward to the evaluation system like this for politicians.  Somehow politicians can say “it’s the other guys fault” and get re-elected, while teachers saying “other factors negatively impact learning” gets ignored and then dismissed (if their evaluations are not good enough).

It is far too easy to feel smug when a student says “I passed math because of you”.  Why do people say this?  Is it because the majority of teachers are, well, ‘bad’?  Or, is it because the math involved is so distorted from any reasonable need for one person to know, that we are faced with a random function (input is teacher behavior, output is ‘success’)?    If we are facing this random function, we would observe almost all teachers having a student say “I passed because of you” … and I believe that this is, in fact, the case.

We need to push for good mathematics that people actually need to know.  At the college level, the New Life project is based on this goal.  In the school setting, there is the “Common Core” … however, I believe that the Common Core does NOT describe good mathematics that people need to know.  Instead, the Common Core seems to be a laundry-list of topics and skills that members of a group nominated, without sharing an underlying criteria the discriminate between good math and math that gets in the way.

We also need to work on ‘advancing the profession’.  Too much of our work is based on oral history and local traditions, without a common framework for building methods that support good learning.  The New Life project has a hope of facilitating this community-building, just like the Carnegie Foundations “Networked Improvement Communities” strives to build the profession.

I did, of course, thank the student for the comment about helping him pass the course.  If it wasn’t such a public venue, I normally also comment about their hard work being critical. 

I hope you will join me in building good mathematics and advancing the profession.
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New Life vs Emporium Models

I am currently at the AMATYC conference in Austin — very good conference.

Earlier today, I had a session entitled “New Life Takes on the Emporium Model for Redesign”.  My intention was to provide a viewpoint on these alternatives, both of which are currently popular. 

Here is the file

Here is the handout from the session (1 page summary): https://www.devmathrevival.net/wp-content/uploads/New-Life-takes-on-the-Emporium-Model-for-Redesign-HANDOUT-final.pdf

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