Category: Conferences

Thanks for a great week!

Thanks to everyone who was in my PBL class this week. I had a wonderful time at the Anja S. Greer PEA Math Conference and met lots of wonderful people. For those of you in my week-long class, please feel free to fill out the course evaluation at:

Schettino Course Evaluation

So many teachers that I’ve met were extremely inspiring – As usual I learned so much from everyone about new ways to view technology, certain types of curriculum, ways to incorporate different topics in the classroom and even how to do a Rubik’s cube. I appreciate this converence so much and keep coming back every year. Thanks again to everyone. Special thank you goes out to Ron Lancaster for his special gift of the DVD movie version of The Housekeeper and the Professor which is a wonderful story of relationship through mathematics and creativity. I highly recommend it. Thanks so much Ron!

Many thanks

I have returned from my trip to Indianapolis and I would like to thank everyone that I met there for turning out to both of the presentations that I gave. The talk I gave on Saturday, which was with my colleague was more about our Problem-Based Learning curriculum at our school. The turn-out there was amazing and we were so impressed with the questions and comments from the group. Some of the feedback was great food for thought, especially some specific questions about our definition of PBL. It was also extremely useful to hear what teachers would feel are the challenges of implementing PBL in the classroom. I would direct some teachers to the blog of a teacher in Massachusetts named Mark Vasicek who has attempted to you PBL pretty consistently for a number of years West Side Geometry. It’s good reading.

I think that one of the reasons that so many people might be interested in even thinking about changing the way that they teach right not is because of recent work through the CCSS. There were so many opportunities at this conference to read about, talk about and learn about the details of the Common Core State Standards that I think by Saturday many people were almost tired of hearing about them. However, PBL definitely directly relates to at least a few of the CCSS standards of Mathematical Practice:

Making sense of problems and persevering in solving them.
Reasoning abstractly and quantitatively.
Constructing arguments and critiquing the reasoning of others.
Looking for and expressing the patterns used in reasoning.

We tried to give examples of how we see these standards coming to life as outcomes in student work on a regular basis in the PBL classroom. Having so many people come up to us afterwards for more information, or with interest in getting in touch was really exciting. Sunshine and I truly hope that you do. I really look forward to it.

First Day at Indy

What a great day at the NCTM national conference in Indianapolis. My colleague and I arrived late last night so I missed registration. However, since my talk was today at 9:30 am, I was supposed to be registered at least two hours before I was supposed to speak, so I needed to be up pretty early to get there to register in the exhibit hall. That was not a problem since I was so excited that I was up at 5:30 anyway. After registering, I went to a presentation of orchestrating successful class discussions in the math classroom which seas geared towards elementary and middle school teachers. This was very interesting because most of what I have read has been about secondary level reaching. It was interesting to sees the framework that they used and how important it was to try to anticipate what you. Thought students would say. Many of the ideas they shared were very similar to what I would have said.

I showed up to my room about 15 minutes early and people started coming in. I was very excited that there was interest in my topic. Because this one was a research session I had not planned many interactive activities because I had so much information to share. However, I encouraged people to be a part of the conversation. I think it went very well because many people shared thoughts during the talk and also stayed afterwards. I ran out of handouts and am hoping that those people with questions will contact me and we can keep the conversation going.

I got some great input from some members of the audience that I think will really help me improve my article. One fellow graduate student told me that he thought I would have a stronger argument for the self-referencing pronoun use being a positive sign of empowerment in the discourse if I used a chi-squared test inn the data I had instead of just looking at it qualitatively. Another preservice teacher told me that I should tr to make a distinction between social norms in the use of the pronouns and sociomathematical norms. I think this is a good point and something that I need to look into more in the current research.

Overall, this first talk was a great experience and I’m so glad it was so well received by those who participated. Hopefully, tomorrow will be just as fun and we’ll get some good responses from the crowd. Thanks to everyone that attended.

Documents for NCTM National Conference

Here are some links to documents that I will make public for my talks at the conference in Indianapolis this week:

Powerpoint Presentation for
Improving Classroom Discourse to Support Communication, Equity, and Students’ Agency

Handout for
Improving Classroom Discourse to Support Communication, Equity, and Students’ Agency

Powerpoint Presentation for
Problem-Based Learning (PBL): A Transformed Perspective for Standards-Based Geometry

Handouts for
Problem-Based Learning (PBL): A Transformed Perspective for Standards-Based Geometry
Emma Willard M225 Course Syllabus with Problem-Based Learning
Emma Willard M225 Course Curriculum Map

Emma Willard School Algebraic Geometry Problem-Based Learning Curriculum
M225 Curriculum 2010-2011

Great International Community

I just returned from a wonderful conference at Ithaca College that was the First North American Conference on GeoGebra, a wonderful Open Source Dynamic Geometry Software package that you can find online at www.geogebra.org. It has been around for a while, but it is only just getting well-known because it is free! It is also amazing because it is written in Java, so that you can easily export the ggb files and put them on web pages, so all you need to run them is a web browser. I am trying to start putting some on my web page, so if you have time, look under the technology page and check in there. I made one that does a wonderful square to rectangle puzzle with a friend named Mark Sawula and an expert named Mike May. I also did another that shows that the sum of the residuals of a data set to the best fit line is zero – you can move the points around and everything.

Anyway, the best part about this conference was how wonderful and open all of the attendees were. It was probably the first conference where the researchers, teachers, professors, graduate students and developers of the software were all working together as equals and I loved the atmosphere. I thought it was amazing, and highly recommend the conference next June 2011 to everyone. Keep you eye out for announcements.

Thank you! Thank you!

What an amazing week I’ve spent in Exeter at the conference. I have met some truly wonderful people, who I feel lucky to call my colleagues in mathematics education. I’ll share some great highlights here.

Monday night we heard Steven Strogatz speak – author of the Calculus of Friendship and honored professor of Applied mathematics at Cornell University. What a touching story (and speaker!) about mentoring, teaching and the reciprocity of learning – I highly recommend the book to any math teacher as it truly captures why we do what we do. There was not a dry eye in the place. At one point I was able to get him to sign my book and he even inquired about what PBL was all about.

Yesterday afternoon I held a Special Interest Group for teachers and others who wanted to discuss issues related to gender equity for girls in STEM fields. I had been surprised to see that the conference director had organized it to be a double session (two hours long), but said, what the heck, we can always end early if people start leaving. Boy, was I surprised when about 20 people came at the beginning and stayed for the whole two hours. We had an amazing and passionate conversation that ranged from questions about best practices for teaching girls in the classroom to sharing personal stories and experiences from science and math education from the participants. I was most surprised to hear from the youngest women educators that biased practices still go on in academia to dissuade women from moving on in advanced degrees.

Everyone’s contributions were so important and I want to thank everyone that came to that session. I learned so much from that discussion, it might have been the highlight of the week for me. (Especially seeing the male teachers that came!) I would reiterate my statement of how important it is to share with our colleagues the message of encouraging girls and merely stating that the problem still exists out there. Creating mentoring programs in our schools is another great idea, as well as showing by role modeling that mathematical women can be strong and feminine.

This may have been the best PEA ASG conference I’ve attended and want to thank all of my own mentors that were here – so many people to be grateful for. Probably the most important is the woman after whom the conference was named – Anjs S. Greer who hired me at Exeter in 1995 – she changed my life and helped make me the educator I am today. I am forever in her debt and continue her work.

Enjoy your summer and thanks again for a great week!

Reality Check

On Friday, I spent the day at Harvard Graduate School of Education, at a conference where many graduate students were presenting on recent research that they have been doing – either for their dissertaion work or for courses they are taking, etc. I observed many students from other schools presenting their work which ranged from highly interesting to highly esoteric. I was excited to hear positive feedback from my research on dialogue in the PBL classroom. Many people felt that it was important work and well done. Very nice to feel validated in that way. I also heard great reseach being done on discipline in urban schools, learning differences in math education and other areas.

I’ve also had this website go public, so hopefully if you are reading this you have either received my invitation email, or have heard from a friend about my website. My hope is to really create an online community where those educators who have been in touch with me with interest in these areas can have a space for the types of discussions that we are all interested in. I think this might be a good start and hopefully it will take off soon.

Busily preparing

I am finishing up my spring break from teaching and I was very busy with a great deal of doctoral work during this time off. I worked on a lot of this website and edited some papers. Currently, I am preparing my presentation for a conference this coming Friday in Cambridge – it will be my first presentation of the research I did last fall on discourse in the PBL classroom. Those who read my proposal commented that they found it interesting, so I am hopeful that it will be well-received. I am looking forward to attending this conference simply to experience a research conference and prepare myself for perhaps a professional conference in the near future.

I had a wonderful conversation this week via Skype with a school in California that has implemented Phillips Exeter’s PBL curriculum this year. It was fun to discuss with their department some of the ups and downs of this year. Interestingly, many of the common obstacles that other schools have faced were what this school brought to the table in that conversation. Hopefully, they have found their stride and will continue their great work into the coming year.

I have got my forums up and running (well, my husband has) and hopefully we will begin some great conversations soon. I look forward to hearing from all of those who have been in contact with me about PBL in the past years and how they are all doing.