The Exxon/NCTM Eleventh Annual Meeting of K-3 Mathematics Specialist Teacher-Leaders will convene on Thursday September 16, and end on Sunday morning, September 19. The conference will be held at Exxon's corporate headquarters in Irving, TX.
The planning committee is pleased to announce that Nicholas Branca and Pat Wasley will be presenting major sessions, and that NCTM President Glenda Lappan will be leading an informal session on Sunday morning.
Nicholas Branca is a professor in the Mathematical Sciences Department at San Diego State University and the former Executive Director of the California Mathematics Project. He has received numerous grants to enhance professional development for teachers of mathematics. A former secondary mathematics teacher, Nicholas has also been an instructor for MathSolutions and has recently been an advisor for Tucson's K-3 project.
Those of you who attended our meeting last year will remember that Pat Wasley was a featured speaker. For those who aren't acquainted with her, Pat is currently the Dean of the Graduate School of Education at Bank Street College in New York City. A former teacher and administrator, she worked in years past with Ted Sizer and the Coalition of Essential Schools and also with John Goodlad. Pat has lectured all over the United States, and in Asia and Australia as well.
The next issue of Intersection will include additional information about each presenter as well as a list of books and/or articles that each has authored.
Opportunities for conversation in focus groups will again be part of the conference. Presenting and facilitating these sessions will be Joan Akers, a former NCTM board member, Investigations author, and former math resource person with San Diego County schools; Bonnie Tank with the San Francisco Exxon Mathematics Project, CA; Bob Callahan, Chico Unified School District's "Teacher in Residence" at California State University, Chico, CA; and Bob Speiser and Chuck Walter, professors in the Department of Mathematics at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT.
Following the pattern of the last few years, the meeting will begin with two concurrent pre-sessions on Thursday afternoon. One will focus on pre-service education, and the other on the Developing Mathematical Ideas (DMI) Institute. Chuck Walter from Brigham Young University, UT will facilitate the pre-service discussion, and Cathy Allen from Bellevue, WA will moderate the conversation about DMI.
Because our group has grown so large, attendance at our annual meeting must again be by invitation only. Invitations will be arriving in the mail shortly.
Pat's Visit to New RochelleThanks to Pat Hess for forwarding this article and the wonderful accompanying photos about her visit to Charlotte Stadler's project in New Rochelle, NY. Ed.
Fourth-grade students at Columbus Magnet School participate in
an investigation that will remain a remembered experience for
their lifetimes. It is called the Hyatt "Math in the
Workplace" Partnership. The students visit the Hyatt 
Regency Hotel in Greenwich, Connecticut, tour the
facility, and talk to the employees to find out what their jobs
entail. Back at school, the students write a resume and fill out
an application for the job they'd like to do. The personnel
director of the hotel comes to interview the students.
Prior to this, the students do math problems encountered in hotel work created by math specialist Charlotte Stadler. For example, a problem on carpeting a room was taken from the exemplars and adapted for fourth grade. Students work only where hired and they can be hired by the accounting department, public relations, catering/kitchen, horticulture (in the atrium), check-in at registration, engineering, and the restaurant. The culmination of this activity is a banquet, planned by the children, where all their math work is brought in and hung around the room. A video, produced by the public relations team, is shown. It is obvious to any observer that the children are learning a myriad of math applications and also that the students exhibit a great deal of respect for the hotel personnel. By the same token, the hotel personnel respects these New Rochelle students and enjoys this opportunity to be a partner in educating them.
For more details and an impressive and
informative "virtual visit" to the New Rochelle
partnership project with the Hyatt Regency Hotel, please visit http://www2.lhric.
org/columbus/hyatt.htm.
Michael Galland, third-grade teacher at Columbus Magnet School in New Rochelle, was conducting a mathematics class. The children—the majority of whom have a non-English primary language—were thinking up ways to make the number 420. The children's explanations were logical and expressed with amazing confidence.
One child said, "You can get to 420
by 4 X 105." Michael probed further by asking the student to
explain more, and the student replied, "You know, it's 105 +
105 + 105 + 105." There is no greater gift a teacher can
give students than confidence in their thinking.
Later in the lesson, Michael asked the students to put down their pencils, figure out the answer to another problem, and raise their hands when they had it. When the hands were raised, Michael invited someone to explain how he had computed the answer. One child answered, "I gave the 4 from 14 to 36, that made 40 plus 10, which is 50, then I added 25 and got 75." After a while the classmates named their method of computing: "I did it Abel's way." These children did all the operations with such assurance that you knew they had a strong sense of number.
Thanks to Cathy Allen, Elementary Curriculum Director in Bellevue, WA, for contributing the following article about what's going on with her project. Ed.
As we have implemented the TERC Investigations curriculum, Exxon has really helped us move forward in developing school-wide Math Leadership Teams for each of our sixteen elementary schools, and in helping those teams work together on a school-wide plan for staff development. An overview of our sessions this year with those teams appears in this article.
Another success for our project came about as a result of two classroom teachers attending a training session for Developing Mathematical Ideas (DMI) at Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts in July of 1998. Those teachers, Sue Bradley and Lynn Beebe, facilitated a Module 1 class here in Bellevue that had 16 participants. The class had enormous success and word of its value spread like wildfire! Sue and Lynn, along with another teacher, Cameon Carver, will return to Mount Holyoke this summer. We are continuing our DMI classes in Bellevue and setting a high goal of training all Bellevue Elementary teachers in DMI within the next five years.
With a district-wide, full implementation of the new curriculum, Investigations in Number, Data, and Space, it became very clear that a strong staff development model was essential. With well over 300 elementary teachers in our district, we knew that effectively meeting with each teacher was out of reach. We realized the value of math leaders as we had used this model in the past. However, we had used the model of one teacher per school as math leader, and getting the message back to the schools often got lost in the shuffle of priorities at the school level. We knew also that it was very important to get the principals on board so that they could be clear about their own understanding of the mathematics, and be a part of ongoing dialogue at their school sites. Therefore, our Math Leadership Teams at each school consist of three teachers (one from each level—early primary, primary, and intermediate) and the principal.
We used our Exxon grant to bring Sherry Beard from Marilyn Burns Education Associates to Bellevue. Sherry was a former math specialist here. We asked her to assist our Math Leadership Teams as they helped the participants:
In the process, schools worked to develop a school-wide plan to address these issues at their buildings.
Each meeting had a focus and addressed common issues brought to the table by the math leaders. A few examples of these meetings follow:
Indicators of implementation. This session included classroom management and environment, mathematics, instructional practices and resources, assessment, and connections between home and school. It also addressed how these indicators are essential to teaching mathematics in the classroom.
Computation and the standard algorithm. For this session, we actually brought in a fourth-grade class to demonstrate children's thinking as they solve and compute problems. The session included discussions about efficient computation — "invented algorithms" — that are constructed using number sense and sound numerical judgments vs. the standard algorithm that is agreed upon by convention.
Following a strand across the grade levels (K-5). This involved helping teachers see how the curriculum is preparing students' mathematical understanding across the grade levels and how it is aligned with our state Essential Academic Learning Requirements. (We used fractions as an example.)
The role of problem-solving in mathematics and the TERC Investigations. This session addressed how problem-solving is building new mathematical knowledge, applying mathematics to everyday life, and applying a wide variety of strategies to solve problems and adapt these strategies to new situations.
Each of our meetings began with the focus of the workshop, and allowed time for schools to think about ways to incorporate it or other needs into their school plans. Each session asked for work to be done in preparation for the next session and schools began to implement their plans at their sites. We still have lots of work to do to continue our process. However, we are on our way and have come a long way this past year. We hope to continue to use this model as we continue on the path to improving mathematics in Bellevue! Thanks, Exxon for your support in getting us this far!
Two Tickets to ChicoTeaming up on a visit to the project site in Chico, CA, Jean Moon and Pat Hess both contributed to this report. Jean wrote the article and Pat took the pictures and wrote the captions. Many thanks to both! Ed.
Recently Pat Hess and I made a visit to our K-3 Math Specialist site in Chico, CA. In the March/April issue of Intersection, Bob Callahan, Visiting Teaching Faculty (VTF) member at California State University (CSU)-Chico, provided readers with a nice description of this new and creative role. Our visit to Chico provided Pat and myself with many opportunities to get better acquainted with both the University and with the Chico Unified School District (CUSD). We talked with teachers and students from CUSD as well as with Bob's university teaching colleagues. In the VTF role, Bob is required to be a math specialist who must function in two worlds. Here are just a few of the activities Bob was doing as he kept one foot in the world of elementary schools and the other in the university realm:
Scenes from two of the elementary
schools we visited, Citrus and Chapman, are being shared with you
in the pictures which accompany this article. Thanks, Pat, for
remembering your camera! This past academic year Bob has been an
integral part of the K-3 classrooms at Citrus and Chapman.
Throughout the school year Bob did demonstration lessons at these
schools. In addition, he helped teachers and administrators with
implementing a new math curriculum, facilitated grade-level
teacher meetings on mathematics, and helped coordinate Family
Math activities. During the spring semester Bob was joined at
Chapman by mathematician Dr. Eliza Berry with whom he
team-teaches.
Of the many activities and events in which Pat and I participated, there is one that stands out in my mind. It was the Faculty Seminar. This seminar meets biweekly and is coordinated by CSU-Chico mathematics faculty member Sharon Ross. In fact, Dr. Ross wrote a successful proposal to the University to support some of the expenses associated with the seminar. As a result of this grant, for example, seminar discussions could be extended through dinner. Bob has played a key role in helping to plan seminar agendas with Sharon Ross. Membership in the seminar was composed of University mathematics faculty who teach mathematics content courses for future teachers as well as mathematics faculty from surrounding community colleges who teach comparable courses.
While Pat and I were visiting Chico, the
seminar was immersed in discussions of assessment. One
presentation was made on student portfolios, another on the use
of student journals. I was struck by how similar these
discussions were in content to those I have heard among classroom
teachers experimenting with new assessment strategies. There was
talk of success and failure, the need for constant revisions, how
to manage time, and how to develop appropriate assessment
criteria.
The VTF role is telling us many things about how skilled classroom teachers like Bob Callahan can function in this kind of math specialist role. We are also learning how a role like this one can bridge the gap between the way preservice teachers experience mathematics in their classes and the way we would like elementary children to experience and learn mathematics in their classrooms.
This gap is being addressed in a number of other K-3 Mathematics Specialist projects as well: Brigham Young University, Iowa State University, New Mexico State University, and the University of Montana at Billings. All of these project sites are working to find the phrase contained in the masthead of this newsletter— an "intersection" — mathematics educators sharing common ground.
Miriam Leiva at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, forwarded this news. Thanks, Miriam! Ed.
"I am writing to share our wonderful news. Rosemary Klein, one of our Project Excel math teachers, is one of twenty teachers being honored nationally as the 1998-99 Exemplary Newspaper in Education Teachers. Rosemary has been an Exxon Teacher since 1994. Many of you may have met Rosemary at the Boston, Minneapolis, or San Francisco NCTM Annual Meetings. Among the U.S. honored teachers, there are only eight from the K-5 level. Rosemary teaches fifth-grade at Cornelius Elementary School in Cornelius, NC, north of Charlotte. In her own words, Rosemary wrote: 'Reading the newspaper shows the interrelationships of science, language, social studies, and math in ways that make sense to children because it involves real issues with real people.'"
"Rosemary is outstanding in every way. She has received many awards, including two Department of Public Instruction Science Travel Grants to Belize, Central America, to learn more about the science, history, and culture. I am particularly proud of Rosemary because when I met her she was a music teacher with no particular interest in mathematics. She later completed the requirements for elementary certification and took mathematics and mathematics education courses under me. She is now a recognized elementary mathematics specialist and leader. We are very proud of her accomplishments!"
We are, too. Congratulations, Rosemary!
Chris is moving from Iowa State University to the Pacific northwest, as she tells us below:
"My new position at Western Washington University will be teaching elementary education—specifically science education methods for both undergraduates and graduate students. The student population is about 11,000. I was told that the university has the largest teacher preparation program in the state. There is a beautiful new $13 million facility just for science and mathematics education.
"The university is located in Bellingham, WA. It is just twenty miles from Canada, and thirty from Vancouver, BC. Bellingham is a town of about 60,000 located on the shores of the Puget Sound and in the shadow of an active volcano, Mt. Baker. Bellingham is also in the Cascades—the only place where the Cascades meet the Sound. When it is not raining, there are supposed to be views of the San Juan Islands, Olympic Mountains, Victoria, Cascades. Do I sound like we want visitors? All the Exxon folks should come for a visit. Just not all at once!"
Thanks, Chris, for letting us know where to find you. We all wish you good luck! Ed.
Many thanks to Cindy Chapman, a second-grade teacher and New Mexico FAME Fellow (Fellows for the Advancement of Mathematics Education), for reviving this column with her review below. Ed.
Having just read One Size Fits Few:
The Folly of Educational Standards (Heinemann, Portsmouth,
NH, 1999), I have to wonder if author Susan Ohanian would
consider me one of the "Standardistos" — her term
for rigid, determined zealots who wish to "prepare"
children for the jobs of the 21st century. I did, after all,
serve on the Middle Childhood/Early Adolescence Math Standards
Committee for the National Board for Professional Teaching
Standards. I also absolutely love the schwa — that funny
little pronunciation mark that looks like an upside-down
"e" and stands for the "uh" sound. Ohanian
seems to associate schwas with standards. I even like apostrophes
(another "no-no" to Ohanian when dealing with young
children), and delight in helping my second-graders learn how to
use and interpret them. No, they don't always all learn, but we
have a lot of fun trying. (I think she might like that, though.)
I'm proud of my national service and of my work with students — even in phonics! — but this book is written to teachers and it sings to our hearts, even if we might (secretly?) believe that standards are important. Ohanian makes an impassioned plea to our living, breathing teacher-souls to stop—stop and think about what we are doing to/for our students and to/for their future in this country. She says what's happening is dangerous, and it's hard to read the book and not begin to quiver and choke just a little (or just a little more?) when seeing the ubiquitous "s" word.
When I first started reading the book for this review, several people said to me, "Well, you don't think she's talking about standards like the NCTM Standards, do you?" Well, I guess not—they actually get a cursory, potential approval. But she does make a case for the very real dangers of what is happening in this country today in the name of standards. The (highly supported) premise is that most of the big people making most of the big decisions about education in this country aren't all that interested in what teachers think or who they are or what they need—much, much less do they care about the children they presumably wish to see better educated, better prepared for the future, and ready to compete on a global scale. This book is destined to be a crucially important book which will, no doubt, be widely ignored. And these big people are the very reason the book will be ignored—scary, no?
The book is important because it puts real live kids first and is so politically incorrect, and because almost nobody else is saying it and because so much of it rings true with what teachers really know and do. It is so easy for those not in education to see themselves as experts and so easy for us in the trenches to think maybe we've got it wrong and they might be right. A wonderfully insightful principal once told me that he'd never seen more guilty people than elementary school teachers because they always blamed themselves when anything didn't go well in their classes and they always took it upon themselves to do something about it. I think that's what Ohanian is doing in this book and asking the rest of us to join her. After all, it's really we who make whatever happens in that classroom happen, no matter what is written on reams of papers tucked into the state baskets somewhere.
Read this book! You may not agree with it (I certainly don't agree with all of it) and that's good, too. We need to know what we really believe and why we really believe it. But you will be enraged, delighted, annoyed, frustrated and ennobled by reading it. In one section of the book Ohanian says that if you think you have the answer to the problem, you're part of the problem. Ohanian may well be part of the problem and so may we all. Let's just stop and think about that.
Note: To read an excerpt from Susan's book, visit www.rethinkingschools.org and click on "current issue." To order One Size Fits Few for $16.00 by credit card, call Heinemann at 1-800-225-5800 or visit www.heinemann.com. Ed.
Thanks to Bob Witte who forwarded the information. Ed.
The Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathematics and Science Education (ENC) is pleased to announce a new Web Site, Teacher Change: Improving K-12 Mathematics. This was designed for local, state, regional, and national leaders who are working with teachers on the challenging task of improving K-12 mathematics teaching and learning.
The Web Site offers professional development workshop activities, full text journal articles about teacher change, teacher narratives, and an overview of school change written by international authorities Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves. Find it at http://change. enc.org/.
We're holding it just for you on EXXONTNT. Tended with care by Anne Herndon and Holli Aflatouni, and hosted at Brigham Young University with the help of Bob Speiser, this is a listserv like no other. If you're curious to find out why, here's how to subscribe:
Just send an e-mail to majordomo@math.byu.edu with these words in the body of the message: subscribe exxontnt. The account from which you send your message will be subscribed to the list, and then you'll receive further information.
It'll be a l-o-n-g, hot summer. Chill out in this pool of on-line conversation. The water's fine!
A few quotations. Ed.
"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves." Anna Quindlen, "Bookshelves," Thinking Out Loud (1993)
"If young people feel no connection to anything, their dislocation is a measure of our failure, not theirs." Christopher Latch, "The I's Have It for Another Decade," New York Times, December 27, 1989.
After you've taken down the artwork, cleaned out your desk, and clapped the erasers, hopefully you'll have a chance to unwind from the challenges and demands of the academic year.
Before the memories of this year grow dim, consider recording for newsletter readers your thoughts about what you learned, what your students learned, what difference your project made, what professional growth your colleagues experienced, or anything else you'd like to share.
And since summer means having a chance to get to those books you've been wanting to read, could you please consider recommending a few to your fellow readers?
Thanks to all who contributed to this issue. The deadline for the July/August issue is Monday, July 19. Please send articles to Jean Ehnebuske, 105 Hideaway Cove, Georgetown, TX 78628; phone, (512) 869-1580; fax, (512) 869-8477; e-mail, jehne@ ibm.net.
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