The Exxon Education Foundation has been selected to receive from the National Society of Fund-Raising Executives (NSFRE) the 2000 Outstanding Foundation Award. The award will be presented at the NSFRE's International Conference on Fund Raising in New Orleans on March 27, 2000.
The Foundation was nominated by the NSFRE Baton Rouge chapter for its work on science and mathematics education in the Baton Rouge, Louisiana schools.
NSFRE sponsors an annual awards program to recognize outstanding achievement by individual, foundation and corporate philanthropists, fund-raising volunteers, and professional fund-raising executives. These national awards are given in recognition of those individuals and organizations whose life-time or long-term achievements have a national impact.
To qualify for the Outstanding Foundation Award, a foundation must demonstrate outstanding commitment through financial support and through encouragement and motivation of others to take leadership roles toward philanthropy and national, international and/or community involvement.
Many thanks to Cindy Chapman for contributing the article below about an especially rewarding collaborative. Cindy is a classroom teacher who has been a participant in FAME (Fellow for the Advancement of Mathematics Education) and a past New Mexico recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics Teaching. Ed.
You may recall reading in Intersection (March /April 1999) about Craig Gates, a student in the Exxon-sponsored MathCo program at Iowa State University, who went to Albuquerque to do his student teaching. Craig student-taught with Teri Brown and Cindy Chapman at Inez Science and Technology Magnet Elementary School last spring, and then graduated from Iowa State with honors and distinction.
Craig had become interested in doing his student-teaching in Albuquerque while at an Exxon conference where he met Albuquerque teachers involved in an Exxon-sponsored alternative assessment project. Craig's working with Teri and Cindy brought together two parts of the Exxon family in a successful collaboration.
The collaboration continues. Craig is now in his first year of teaching, and is teaming with Cindy in a first and second-grade multi-age class at Inez. Cindy and Craig teach their 44 students together each morning for an hour of calendar math, poetry, literature, and problem-solving. They have two classrooms in which they teach their students throughout the day according to math and reading levels as well as by grade-levels for other subjects. The idea for Cindy and Craig to teach together originated with the school's principal, Leon Bartels, who said last spring that he thought they would make a "dynamite team."
Parent reactions to having their students placed in a multi-age class at the beginning of the year ranged from horror to skepticism to curiosity. Some parents honestly had never heard of such a thing as a multi-age class— although it is hardly anything new or unusual in the Albuquerque schools. After their first set of parent/teacher conferences last month, Cindy and Craig were delighted by the overwhelmingly positive comments of their parents. Some parents have already approached Principal Bartels about the possibilities of more multi-age classes at Inez.
Cindy and Craig have been invited to be featured speakers at the NCTM Annual Meeting in Chicago this spring. Their talk is "Young Children's Mathematical Representations— What is the Role of the Teacher?" Representation is a new process standard being introduced this spring in NCTM's Standards 2000 document. Cindy and Craig are using the first year of their program to explore the mathematical thinking and work of their young students as they prepare for the Chicago meeting. They recently spoke at the New Mexico State Science, Mathematics, and Environmental Education Conference.
You can get a glimpse into Cindy and Craig's program by clicking onto: www.swcp. com/~cgates/. The site is still under construction, but includes all of their newsletters for the year as well as pictures of students.
Editor's Note: News that Cindy and Craig will be presenters in Chicago was also shared in October's Albuquerque Public School's employee newsletter. Praising them as a "unique team combining a veteran and first-year teacher," the newsletter quoted Cindy's remarks about their session on representation:
"We'll explore the mathematical thinking of our first and second-graders as we examine their use of representation and our role in helping them express themselves mathematically in ways that communicate to others. Representation encourages us to think about the importance of listening to children and humbly attempting to help them say what it is they wish to say."
The article below was contributed by Miriam Leiva, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Mathematics at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte (UNCC). Many thanks, Miriam! Ed.
Excel MATH ( EXXON Connects Leaders in Mathematics), funded by Exxon since 1992, is a project based at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte to connect K-16 teachers, administrators and other educators in order to improve K-12 mathematics education. Our initial goal was to "link the unlinked": university professors of mathematics and education, elementary teachers, school administrators, and schools. These efforts resulted in a partnership between school systems and the university, and in the selection of ten K-6 classroom teachers who would become Excel MATH program leaders.
Because the first task was to review and revise the mathematics curriculum for pre-service K-6 teachers at the university, all participants "learned" and adopted the mathematics reform through studying documents such as the NCTM Standards, and the MAA's A Call for Change. They also attended state and national conferences. For most of the participants it was the first such experience--an eye-opener! Professors gained first-hand knowledge about elementary school teaching and pedagogical concerns from interaction with the teachers and visiting their classrooms. Among the most significant results was the department's funding a faculty position for a Teacher-in-Residence (initially an elementary teacher and now all levels). This funding continues and is one indication of the value the university places on having future teachers prepared by "real" classroom teachers, with professorial rank on a one-year appointment.
Excel MATH has been expanded to include the professional development of teachers and the mentoring of new teacher-leaders at all levels, K-12. It also includes a research component and school-based activities. Today, we are disseminating and implementing what we learned through on-going long range relationships with schools and school systems.
The following three examples illustrate some of the activities of Excel MATH that are designed to meet the needs of the schools involved:
There are two additional programs in place to prepare the emerging new Excel MATH leaders and to align the curriculum "vertically" K-12. Some UNCC faculty members and teachers-in-residence continue to be involved in the project, which is now primarily supported by area school systems.
We are very proud of the accomplishments of our teacher-leaders. Three have completed National Board Certification, one has completed the doctorate degree, and over 95% have completed their Master Degrees—several with a Mathematics Education concentration. Many have been honored by our state organization and have presented at national and regional conferences. Others have received national, state, or local awards, have been elected officers of NCCTM, and are on state committees that are shaping our educational reforms. They continue to bring distinction to their school system and to the Exxon Education Foundation.
Our professional development work is based on the important meaningful mathematics that has been defined by the North Carolina Standard Course of Study and is not tied to a textbook or set of materials. Our workshops, entitled MATHiNC (Mathematics in NC), are grounded on the content strands identified by the NC Department of Instruction (Number and Computation; Patterns, Relations, and Algebra; Geometry and Measurement; Statistics and Probability). MATHiNC participants work together on the mathematics—explorations, applications—but not on "isolated activities" unless they support the content. We model good teaching practices based on such documents as the NCTM Professional Teaching Standards. Our work is grounded in a seamless approach to content, instruction, and assessment.
The goal of Excel MATH is to prepare pre-service and in-service teachers to help all students develop:
The challenge is to continue our efforts to make these goals a reality for all our students.
Note to readers: Miriam Leiva directs Excel MATH full-time. Contact her through maleiva@email.uncc.edu.
News has been received from Carol Brooks that Bob Wortman, formerly the principal of Borton Primary Magnet School in the Tucson Unified School District, has been appointed Director of Title I and K-3 Programs for that district.
Many readers became acquainted with Bob at a previous Exxon conference, and many have met his wife, Jackie, at past annual meetings. Congratulations and best wishes, Bob!
Many thanks to Pat and Jean for these essays. Ed.
Your editor, Jean, asked me to write my thoughts about what I've seen in my eleven years with the Exxon K-3 project. That means I'm going to ramble.
First there was and is universal appreciation from the teachers that a large, respected corporation foundation recognizes and wants to support the work of early elementary school teaching and learning. This came as a surprise, as these professionals often perceive their work as being held at the bottom of the education totem pole.
Another universal appreciation was the chance to attend NCTM conferences and to be active partners in the implementation of the Curriculum and Evaluation Standards. At Exxon's traditional receptions during NCTM Annual Meetings, there has always been excited talk among teachers about what is being learned at the sessions.
From my visits to projects, I've noticed a shift in the math teachers' listening. In the early years, teachers listened to students primarily to see if the answer or procedure was correct, correct as the teacher perceived it. Now teachers are listening to students, listening so they can understand the individual child's mathematical thinking.
There has also been a shift in other areas. In the early days, cooperative learning groups were orchestrated by the teacher; now they appear to happen when conducive to learning. Manipulatives often were used to get the answer to routine problems; now they are often used to explore concepts.
When I came on board with this project, I was asked to create a network, plan and conduct a conference of project directors, and be a facilitator of the K-3 Project. What's a facilitator? I used to answer that question with a dictionary sort of answer such as, "Someone who makes the path easier for the projects to achieve their goal."
Now I know that the most critical attribute of a facilitator is to be a very active listener—to actually join with the project in a relationship, a relationship where I, the facilitator, embrace the same goals, pitfalls, and successes of the individual sites. I needed to constantly listen and imagine, putting myself in participants' shoes. Now I know as soon as I begin taking over and imposing my ideas, the listening, the relationship, and the facilitation is broken. There is an important place for math coordinators, but they are not the same as facilitators. Being a facilitator of this project has been a continual learning experience for me.
The Gregorian calendar, which defines 365 days as the measure of a year (via a decree in 1582 from Pope Gregory XIII), plays a significant role in ordering all our lives regardless of ethnicity, religious heritage, or profession. This is particularly the case as we stand on the eve of a new century, a new millennium. Let me say just a few more words about calendars as the more I have plumbed this history, the more fascinated I have become.
As Ed Ahnert reminded me, the Gregorian calendar is not just a human construct; it has roots to the natural world as the months and weeks are based on lunar cycles. However, the days and months as we now know and experience them have not always been so. The calendar previous to the Gregorian calendar was the Julian calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BC. This calendar had its own unique configuration. Prior to the Julian calendar, the Roman calendar started each year on March 1. Interestingly, this calendar consisted of only 304 days or 10 months.
However, we do owe the introduction of January 1 as the start of a new year to Julius Caesar. Italy and England, interestingly enough, did not make January 1 official until around 1750. To make things even more interesting, the Byzantine Empire, beginning in 395 AD, used September 1 as the first day of a new year. Moreover, they did not count years since the birth of Christ; rather, they counted years since the creation of the world which they dated as 1 September 5509 BC. So are we really on the eve of a new millennium or not?
Whatever the case, the millennium blitzkrieg is on and we find ourselves pulled toward reflection and recollection as we enter the dawn of a "new" century. I am sure you have your own thoughts and feelings about moving from the twentieth into the twenty-first century. I, too, have found myself engaged in a range of personal and professional reflections.
For example, I have found myself thinking a great deal about the nature of teaching. As a profession, how has teaching come to define itself over the past hundred years? Are we closer to understanding and hence, being able to describe, the particular essences of this profession? What is and what will be the identity of this profession and those within who are known as teachers? My sense of things is that as a profession teaching will be undergoing significant change in the next decade
I suspect I have been pulled to these exact questions because of the increasing association of teaching and teachers with the concept of "community." Community formation and identify have been an interest of mine for some time. More and more frequently the literature on teacher education is punctuated with community and community-like metaphors and images. Parker Palmer in his book The Courage to Teach (1998, Jossey-Bass) writes, "Community, or connectedness, is the principle behind good teaching. . . different teachers with different gifts create community in surprisingly diverse ways, using widely divergent methods." (p.115)
A former colleague of mine from Alverno College, Tim Riordan, writes in an essay titled, Beyond the Debate: The Nature of Teaching, "We can agree, then, that teaching extends beyond what teachers do in the classroom to the various kinds of study they need to do to develop as educators. This is an assumption that seems almost embarrassingly obvious, but it may have implications that challenge the conventional images of what it means to be a teacher." Later on he notes, "The scholarship of teaching cannot take place in isolation; it must possess a pervasive collegial character. . . ."
Moreover, the language and metaphor of community is defining new models of professional development for teachers. For instance, one of objectives of the Developing Mathematical Ideas professional development curriculum for teachers of mathematics is to establish a community of inquiry. The principal developers of this project—Deborah Schifter, Virginia Bastable and Susan Jo Russell—describe a community of inquiry as one that has a sense of shared purpose and norms of conduct that allow participants to focus on ideas, both their own and those of their colleagues.
Community as a concept is not restricted to professional collaboration (teachers in collaboration with teachers), but where the core activities of teaching unfold— in the classroom. Some (Silver, Stein and Smith, 1998) make the argument that learning mathematics should be a social activity, not just an individual activity. "If school mathematics is to be authentic in its relationship to the culture of mathematical practice, mathematics classrooms must become communities in which students engage in collaborative mathematical practice, sometimes working with each other in overt ways and always working with peers and the teacher in a sense of shared community and shared norms for the practice of mathematical thinking and reasoning." (p.19)
The important question for me in all of this is, How is the concept of community helping us to more clearly articulate the core ideas of teaching, the hard-to-define essences of this profession? What does this concept introduce that others may have not?
Central to the concept of community is the idea of connections; being connected to others and to a set of shared ideas. In her book, Good Fences, (Cowley Publications, 1999), Caroline Westerhoff talks about the centrality of connections as part of community in almost a counter-intuitive way. She describes how connections to one another grow stronger as individual identities become clearer, less fragile. In other words, strong communities thrive on diversity, not standardization or murkiness. She writes (p. 53), "Boundaries separate and define us so that we can be together. If we do not assert who we are and what we are about—if we try to be everything to everybody—we finally will have nothing to offer anyone. And if we do not make the effort to learn who others are and what they are about, we will not be able to connect with them and receive all that they hold out to us."
It seems to me that teaching gathers up great diversity in its midst, despite many decades of efforts to standardize teaching practice and the environments in which that practice unfolds. Perhaps we are just coming to understand what distinctive roles for teachers might emerge if we plumbed, as Westerhoff suggests, the call to more clearly describe the multiplicity of roles (who we are and what we are about) that can be encompassed in the profession of teaching.
Looking for diversity within a profession is certainly not unusual. Within the medical profession, among nurses and doctors, the idea of specialties and subspecialties serves to define simultaneously the breadth and depth of that profession, its complexities and its special needs. At the same time, there is a pull, a tension if you will, to have that specialty contribute back to the larger whole, the medical profession as a community of practitioners.
St. Benedict's Rule is a pattern of living that stresses the individual and the individual as a member of a community. There is an interesting tension in this kind of relationship; the individual contribution has to find ways of giving back to the well-being of the entire community and the community must find ways to support the individual. This task is not as easy as it sounds! At the same time, I believe there is something to be learned from looking carefully at this kind of tension.
My journey into wanting to explore the crooks and crannies of this thing called the profession of teaching comes in large measure from my sense of how unexplored it really is. Community as a type of metaphor is one device that I believe can help in that exploration. There are others. We know more of how individual teachers carry out their craft, but we know far less about the profession that binds these individual actions together. That it seems to me is an important challenge for the next "allotment" of time, whatever calendar is used.
Thanks to Pat Baggett at New Mexico State University for sending the news that follows. Ed.
As a part of the New Mexico Collaborative for Excellence in Teacher Preparation, we are offering for the third consecutive year an Institute for university instructors involved in mathematics content and methods courses for prospective and practicing K-8 teachers. Other interested parties are also invited.
The Institute will be held over four days—Saturday, March 18 through Tuesday, March 2—at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, NM. During the Institute, participants will visit two experimental sections of our K-8 teacher preparation courses, Math 112/501 (Fundamentals of Elementary Mathematics II) and Math 301/501 (Elementary Mathematics with Technology) involving a collaboration between K-8 teachers in the Las Cruces Public Schools and elementary education undergraduate students working in a mentor/apprentice arrangement. (Prospective and practicing teachers meet in a joint university class, and try some of the units they do in the university classes with children in real classrooms.)
Institute attendees will have two days of workshops, during which materials used in the courses will be presented and distributed. They will also visit classrooms of teachers taking the courses, when materials from the course are being taught in schools. Attendees will also be invited to submit papers for a mini-conference that will provide opportunities for sharing innovative mathematics education programs occurring at their home institutions.
Hosts include Karin Matray, Director of Professional Development for the Las Cruces Public Schools and Professor Rick Scott from NMSU's College of Education. Some (partial) funding will be available for travel and living expenses. Also, attendees will be given materials for the courses at no charge. For more information (including an Institute schedule, information about housing, the mini-conference, red and green chile, etc.), please contact Patricia Baggett at baggett@nmsu.edu. You may also visit http:// math.nmsu.edu/breakingaway/ and follow the Math Ed Institute link. Caution: Pat's "Breaking Away from the Math Book" web site offers so much, you'll want to stay for hours! Ed.
Please note that the registration deadline is January 14, 2000.
DMI (Developing Mathematical Ideas) Leadership Institutes have been announced for summer 2000. These staff development opportunities are designed to help teachers think through the major ideas of K-6 mathematics and to examine how children construct those ideas. The sessions are funded in part by the Exxon Education Foundation.
Institute I is scheduled from July 16 to 28. Providing opportunities for participants to become familiar with the DMI curriculum, it is designed for teams of staff developers, teacher educators, teacher-leaders and others who support teachers' professional development to consider how DMI might be a tool to forward the mathematics education agenda at their schools. The cost of $1500 covers room, board, four graduate credits in mathematics education, and access to an electronic network that offers support.
Institute II is slated from July 15 to 21. This session is for those who have already had Institute I, or who have facilitated or participated in a DMI seminar.
During the same week, Institute III will be offered. Designed for those who have attended Institute II and would like to dig more deeply into issues of facilitation, it will involve new DMI materials on geometry and data. The $1100 cost for each session includes room, board, and access to the electronic network support system.
For more information and/or an application form, contact SummerMath for Teachers at Mount Holyoke College at (413) 538-2063 (phone); (413) 538-2002 (fax); smt-dmiinfo@mtholyoke.edu.
See the October issue of Teaching Children Mathematics for "Bridging the Gap," an article by Judith Covington. In her seventh year teaching mathematics courses for elementary education majors at Louisiana State University, Judith is a fellow in the Foundation-supported Project NExT (New Experiences in Teaching) and has been a past contributor to Intersection (September 1998). In addition to addressing the importance of communication and exchanges between college and K-12 faculty members, the article gives a nice overview of both the K-3 Math Specialist Program and Project NExT.
to the year 2000 and the promise of new opportunities, unique challenges and meaningful learning it holds for all of us. Best wishes to you and yours for a restful and reflective holiday season.
A special thanks to those who contributed to this issue. If you'd like to have your article or news appear in the very first issue of the year 2000, please send your contribution no later than Monday, January 10 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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