The Final Edition – May 30, 2023

Curated By Nate Goza @thegozaway
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Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight at 9:00 PM EST: Our Final Webinar!

Finding Joy in Math

Presented by Howie Hua

It is common for a math educator to hear “I’m not a math person” or “Oh, I hate math.” How can we show that math as a subject is something to go towards rather than avoid? In this talk, we will discuss ways of finding joy in doing math inside and outside of the classroom.

Click here to register for this webinar!

#GMDWrites

NCTM Principles and Standards From an International Perspective: How Does the Curriculum Bring Educators Together on a Common Discourse?

Written by Yeliz Günal Aggül

Curriculum has a very central role in teachers’ lives. Mostly, curriculum is identified with, characterized, and concretized through resources, called “curricular guidelines” in the literature (Pepin & Gueudet, 2014). Their titles might change from country to country. To give examples from two countries where I conduct my research, I can mention NCTM Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (2000) or Common Core State Standards for School Mathematics in the USA and the Teaching Program in Turkey. Regardless of the country in which it is designed and implemented, these resources provide a framework and a national agenda for which learning outcomes will be taught and when. Beyond this central role, curriculum has another, mostly taken for granted, function that has to do with teachers’ solving their problems of practice and improving their teaching. A successfully designed curriculum provides a common discourse that functions as an anchor and orientation that supports teachers in shaping their teaching, finding a path to pursue their professional development, collaborating with their colleagues, and partnering with educational researchers in this process. Ball and Cohen (1999) clearly explain the importance of a common discourse among educators in advancing education:

  • In the education of professionals, discourse serves additional purposes, which are related to building and sustaining a community of practitioners who collectively seek human and social improvement. The discourse of teacher education should also help to build collegiality within the profession and create a set of relations rooted in shared intentions and challenges. Such discourse should focus on deliberation about and development of standards for practice and on the improvement of teaching and learning (Ball & Cohen, 1999, p. 11).
Considering the fact that the curriculum is the main tool that represents and reflects this common discourse, I will discuss the following questions: Who determines this discourse and how in different countries? Does the curriculum fulfill this function successfully in any country?

I will provide some answers to these questions as a doctoral candidate in learning sciences who closely works with mathematics teachers in her research and as a former teacher who taught middle and high school mathematics for seven years in Turkey. Throughout my doctoral studies, I explored if there were alternative ways of supporting teachers to improve their practices other than top-down professional development programs in which the knowledge is transmitted from researchers to teachers in a unidirectional way. With this motivation, since April 2022, I have supported a group of mathematics teachers in creating their professional community under a non-profit organization in Turkey called Teachers Network by implementing a methodological paradigm in learning sciences known as participatory design research.

The first phase of the community-building process was dedicated to problem identification. To discuss and consolidate the common problems of practice of community teachers who taught at different schools and levels, community teachers read the book The Teaching Gap by Stigler and Hiebert (1999), watched the lesson videos from different countries recorded in the scope of the TIMSS Video Study (http://www.timssvideo.com/), and reflected on their own experiences as teachers in Turkey in light of the arguments in the book. Throughout our problem identification sessions, one question that teachers raised dominated our discussions: There was a widely admitted public opinion in Turkey that mathematics teaching needed to be improved, but what was the common goal of mathematics educators in Turkey while working toward improving mathematics education in the country? This question was not sufficiently discussed in public. As teachers read the book, watched the lesson videos, and discussed their common problems of practice, they identified many aspects of the dominant teaching culture of their country that inhibited students’ access to learning environments in which they could make sense of mathematics. This led them to take a fresh look at the “Teaching Program,” also known as “curriculum,” that the Turkish Ministry of Education has published: What type of vision did this resource draw for teachers? Did it provide a vision that challenged these problematic cultural norms so that teachers could overcome them in their classrooms and collaborate with their colleagues toward improving their practice?

Community teachers concluded that it was hard to make sense of the curriculum for teachers with its current format since it did not clearly articulate a pedagogical vision that mathematics educators could work toward achieving in their practice. The objectives were listed according to grades; however, the part shared for the common and subject-specific goals included broad and vague sentences without references to the scientific resources that helped curriculum designers write these objectives. In that regard, their curriculum could not support mathematics educators meeting around a common discourse. The long-term goal of the community was to design mathematics lessons together; however, without a common pedagogical orientation, or, in other words, a common understanding of what good mathematics teaching is, engaging in such an endeavor would be similar to constructing a building without a foundation. As teachers developed awareness of this issue, the community decided to learn more about other countries’ curriculum structures and to read scientific resources on mathematics teaching and learning so that they could fill this gap and come up with common principles and pedagogical understanding as a community.

The basic resource that they utilized during this phase was Van de Walle, Karp, and Bay-Williams’ seminal book, Elementary and Middle School Mathematics: Teaching Developmentally. This book took NCTM’s Principles and Standards (2000) as a starting point. As a result, we conducted a closer examination of NCTM’s guide. We conducted discussions focusing on the first three chapters and compared them to the Teaching Program in Turkey. During these discussions, some features of NCTM’s Principles and Standards, which contradicted their experience with the curriculum they were using in Turkey, caught the attention of the teachers. There were some distinguishing features of this guide that helped educators meet around a common discourse to improve teaching:

  1. Although traditional cultural codes of teaching in the US, as mentioned in Stigler and Hiebert (1999), do not cohere with the teaching philosophy that NCTM promotes, the Standards document produces a counter discourse and takes a clear, determined reformist position.
  2. NCTM, as a civil organization, provides an effective compilation of research findings on mathematics teaching and learning in this document in an accessible language for those who are not researchers. Being an independent organization of mathematics educators, it functions independently from state bureaucracy, which protects it from political shifts in the country. It also displays a common attitude among mathematics educators who take science and the universal humanitarian goals of education as their points of departure.
  3. NCTM has a clear position regarding the pedagogical principles it follows, of which the first one is “equity”, described as “excellence in mathematics education requires equity—high expectations and strong support for all students” (p. 12).
  4. It provides a clear outline of how objectives are related from kindergarten to 12th grade, helping teachers have a birds-eye view of the mathematics taught, what their students learn in lower and later grades, and the connections among mathematical ideas. In this way, teachers can make sense of the curriculum, and as a result, they become active agents in implementing and improving this common discourse in practice.

This is not an exhaustive list of the important features of NCTM’s Principles and Standards. My goal here is to provide an international perspective that highlights the significance of these aspects, which are considered ordinary in the daily lives of educators in the United States, and above all, to emphasize how NCTM’s Principles and Standards provide a robust framework for not only mathematics educators in the USA but also as a civil organization that has a universal value that helps to develop a common discourse while improving mathematics classrooms all across the world. Since they did this analysis, our community has appreciated the NCTM’s guide and worked to get a deeper understanding of the vision provided in it. We held long discussions on whether this resource responded to community teachers’ own questions and concerns that they have as practitioners in Turkey.

Designing a curriculum that provides a coherent and robust discourse alone cannot serve as a magical solution to the challenges in education. It is crucial to have effective methods of conveying the intentions of curriculum designers in order to achieve the desired goals. Expecting teachers to simply rely on programs by ignoring their agency should not be the way to disseminate the discourse that curriculum designers wish to share. While a robust, scientifically-based curriculum serves as a starting point for change, implementing systemic changes should also involve teacher learning systems that encourage teachers to actively participate in knowledge building and cultural transformation processes. All stakeholders need to collaborate in developing creative ways of designing participatory professional learning environments, enabling a shared discourse to evolve as teachers engage with curriculum resources and as research meets practice. Only this approach empowers teachers to exercise agency, adapt the curriculum flexibly to meet the specific needs of their students, and take control of their own continuous professional learning.

References

Ball, D. L. & Cohen, D. K. (1999). Developing practice, developing practitioners: Toward a practice-based theory of professional education. In G. Sykes and L. Darling-Hammond (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession: Handbook of policy and practice (pp. 3-32). San Francisco: Jossey Bass.

NCTM (2000). Principles and standards for school mathematics. National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Reston.

Pepin, B. & Gueudet, G. (2014). Curriculum resources and textbooks in mathematics education. In S. Lerman (Eds.), Encyclopedia of mathematics education (pp. 132-135). Springer.

Stigler, J. W., & Hiebert, J. (1999). The teaching gap: Best ideas from the world’s teachers for improving education in the classroom. New York: The Free Press.

Van de Walle, J. A., Karp, K. S., & Bay-Williams, J. M. (2020). Elementary and middle school mathematics: Teaching developmentally. Pearson.

GMD and the Blurring of Boundaries
I can’t believe it’s been around five years since I wrote my first GMD post. It all started when Nate Goza reached out to me, via Grace Chen, about writing for the newsletter. Back then, my role was to summarize whatever was going in the world of math ed, particularly from the standpoint of those on math ed twitter through hashtags like #MTBoS. It was one of my first opportunities to be part of a larger professional community outside of my immediate circle. It also marked the beginning of understanding myself as something I’ll tentatively call a “teacher-scholar”.

The term teacher-scholar might be a loaded term. I use it cautiously because it can connote a teacher who is necessarily part of the formal academy. This is not how I want to use the term. To me, a teacher-scholar might be someone who teaches while also staying interested in professional growth, understanding the sociopolitical aspects of schooling and/or maybe keeping up with academic research. I like to think that many, if not most, teachers can be said to be teacher-scholars. Before becoming a teacher, I was a member of a different professional community: the law. I never vibed with that community, probably because I found myself on the business side of things. After leaving the law, I found myself in a world that felt more like home. Maybe this was because of the scholarly orientation of the job. By becoming a teacher, I could become someone committed to a life of curiosity and creativity. In law, I could become immersed in critical race theory or feminist legal theory. But at the end of the day, I had to go back to the office and give advice to corporate clients based on the same set of statutes and case law. In the classroom, ideas like culturally responsive-sustaining education were not just interesting in their own right; they became necessary for thinking about my role as a teacher, how I interacted with my students, and how I planned for instruction on a daily basis.

This is where the GMD and larger math edutwitter space come in. I learned about ideas like culturally responsive/relevant/sustaining education in these spaces during my first few years of teaching. The ideas of culturally responsive/relevant/sustaining education come from the writings of incredible people like Gloria Ladson-Billings, Geneva Gay, Django Paris, and Samy Alim. But access to these ideas requires an awareness that they exist, and then in many cases it requires digital access to journal articles through a university account (email me for article requests!). The GMD newsletters, webinars, and twitter chats were there for anyone to access. Granted, math edutwitter is an imperfect space and access to the resources it offers is not universal — it is at the end of the day a mostly young-ish crowd, tech savvy, and likely predominantly white, with many “sub-communities” who have thrived in the face of these realities. Nevertheless, the GMD was an incredible place—for me, and hopefully for others—to start to nurture a scholarly approach to teaching that did not require a formal affiliation with the academy.

As it turns out, I ended up pursuing a doctorate in education. 😅. In hindsight, the GMD and math edutwitter bears a not insignificant responsibility for that decision. Being on the inside, so to speak, has allowed me to see in even clearer terms how the academy can be separated from the everyday work of teachers. For structural reasons tied to culture and capitalism, the output and currency of most academic research comes in the form of journal articles. Many of these articles can only be accessed by other academics through subscription access or the purchase of books that are sometimes $100+. Yes, you can and should reach out to authors to ask if they would be willing to send you a PDF copy of their work. But not everyone will, or even can, overcome that interactional friction. Hence, what results is the first and very real wall of separation between the academy and the rest of the world. Elsevier and others, I’m looking at you!

Paywalls are just one aspect of this separation. The language of many journal articles can be obtuse and overly reliant on knowledge of theories and concepts found in other journal articles. To understand X article, you need to read A, B, C theory just to understand what is going on [is academia the original MCU?!]. For better or worse, this might be a symptom of the advice that I received about journal article writing: when submitting an article for publication, make sure it is part of a broader academic conversation. Cite the relevant literature. Keep it under 9,000 words. The result is a potentially wonderful piece of work with terribly dense language that seems to enter an existing conversation mid-stream. The format is often standardized in a way that makes it easier for other academics to read but can be an obstacle for everyone else. Every article seems to conclude with super interesting “more research is required” questions that you may never see or, more likely, may never hear about until three years after those ideas are first introduced at a conference with a $350 registration fee, not excluding hotels, airfare, and food. Oh, and all the articles are only available in English.


The GMD blurred a lot of boundaries. It was a healthy mix of K-12 teachers and university academics, with a leaning toward academics near the end, perhaps as some of us switched over to graduate school. The conversations that folks were having through the newsletter and the webinars were beyond what I was exposed to at my school’s PD sessions. They were deep topics covered at a level of depth that I did not necessarily “grow out of” once I went to graduate school. Ideas like open middle problems, critical data consumption, coded language, and humanizing mathematics have stuck and will continue to stick with me. Even the latest GMD newsletter article–with discussions of concepts like data feminism and black feminist mathematics pedagogies–continues to blow me away. These ideas are being shared in a freely available platform by a team of volunteers. Should people be compensated for their labor? Absolutely. But to the extent that the GMD came together because of folks who were so passionate about their ideas that they wanted to share it in this venue, then what the GMD achieved is absolutely incredible.

🔥🔥🔥

The GMD was a special place to nurture a spirit of teaching-scholarship. It blurred boundaries between the everyday work of teaching and the too often unscalable walls of the ivory tower. I’ll be forever grateful for the opportunities I had to experiment and share ideas. So to anyone reading this, I just wanted to say thanks for everything.
@melvinmperalta

Some Things Can’t be Washed Away

Contributed by Carl Oliver

It’s wild to think I’ve been a part of the Global Math Department for over a decade. I watched, and participated in the webinars before the 2013-2014 school year. The technology at that time was amazing. The idea that talks from other educators could be on video was impressive, and we could watch these live! You could also communicate with the other math teachers watching. The chat resembled a exclusive twitter-chat for people watching. The talks meant a lot for my growth as a teacher. It was very well organized with new talks coming week after week. This is very similar to sidewalk chalk parties outside of my building (stick with me).

On our sidewalk a Mom from nextdoor would always go outside of my dinner and create these elaborate sidewalk chalk obstacle course drawings with her kids. One might say “…jump 10 steps, walk backwards, do hopscotch…” Kid would do the course, and then they can get chalk and add more obstacles. When I would come down with my kids she would let them know they could appreciate the art work, they could run on the course, but they could help make it, too. “Hi, here’s a piece of chalk… You can start right over here. We’re drawing unicorns, but you can draw whatever you want!” Sure enough, my kids would be immersed in extending the course and would run through the course over and over. My experience with GMD seemed a lot like these sessions. You could appreciate the webinars, you can read people’s thoughts, but you can help make it, too.

Towards the end of that school year, Michael Pershan “handed me a piece of chalk.” He invited me to give a talk, encouraging me to talk about, “Anything that you’d be excited about.” I was thrilled and immediately thought of something different. With the help of Michael and Chris Robinson and Megan Hayes-Golding I was all set to present my talk “Economica! Using economics as a context for math exploration.” It was a quiet evening in June, but it was hugely empowering. I would end up doing even more stuff with the GMD. Later that year joined the board. I wrote for the Newsletter with Megan Schmidt, and I took over hosting the website and still host it today (sorry it’s not updated).

Eventually rain comes to ruin every great chalk drawing. For me, the rain clouds started forming when I had two young kids, whose bedtime routines were…active…, and also in direct conflict with GMD sessions. It didn’t help that I also became an administrator at my school and had a lot more on my plate. The pandemic magnified both of these things. Aside from working with Leigh, Nate, and Amanda about the website, I kind of fell out of touch with everything. I couldn’t believe when Leigh told me a few months ago that the rain clouds are coming for the GMD as a whole. It was hard to imagine that this is the last year of the Global Math Department, but it must have been even harder for the current leadership to make that call. Rain clouds can wash away amazing pieces of art and evidence of community work, but they can also leave behind opportunity.

It wasn’t long after hearing from Leigh that I was taking my kids out to play in front of our building for the first time since the winter. It was also the first time since the Mom from next door moved out of the neighborhood. I sat there for a while thinking about how to explain that they won’t have someone to coordinate the drawing, and start off a chalk obstacle course. There’d be no one to hand them a piece of chalk. Then I thought about new teachers at our school and how they won’t have GMD to rely on like I did as a young teacher. No institution to connect them with a community to show them ideas to help their teaching and give them a chance to take on a leadership role and support the growth of other teachers.

In the few minutes that passed while I was staring into space, figuring out what to say, my girls had already got party started. They already found chalk, started drawing and even pulled in a new girl from down the street. The kids all worked on making their own version of an obstacle course full of new ideas. I jumped in and we kept adding parts of the course until it extended to the front of the neighbors old building, and then it looped back around so they could run it again and again. I was glad that we could keep the spirit of my neighbor alive, and I realized that some people could do the same for the global math department. Out of the hundreds (thousands?) of teachers touched by Global Math Department, hopefully someone new will step up and keep the spirit alive, but renew it as well.

Thanks Global Math Department for all the years of new ideas, inspiration and connection. It’s sad to see it come to an end, but I’m excited to see a new crop of teachers come up with something else in the years to come.

Final Thoughts from the Final Curator

Crafted with much trepidation and not much writing experience by Nate Goza

Hi I’m Nate. I’m a high school math teacher and the only “editor” left at GMD. It’s been that way for a while now. It’s a long story…

I started editing for GMD in November of 2016. At the beginning of the 2018 school year, I took over the lead role for the Newsletter and took up a spot on the GMD Board of Directors. Shout out to Brian showing me the ropes and giving me the opportunity, to Leigh and Marissa for being so great to me, to Dylan for reaching out initially, and to Michael for starting the Newsletter in the first place. At some point we changed my title to “curator.” That’s because I never edited anything. I just collected the articles from our fabulous writing teams and shared them with the world.

Six and a half years of volunteering is a long time. We’re at the end now, and as the final Newsletter approaches, I wonder, should I write something??

Certainly, there are many things I could write about… 🤔…

I could write about my experience with the Newsletter and how things went after I took the lead role. I would thank Grace for connecting me with Marian and Melvin who helped me fill out the writing teams in the beginning. Marian was incredible at elevating voices, and she helped connect us with Lauren and Hema who contributed so SO much. Melvin was an incredible writer and advocate for the Newsletter. He helped with the Twitter account and even took up a role on the Board for a time. I would thank Mathew for all his great articles and for helping to make space for Hema and her incredible voice. I would thank Hema for all her help too, for the amazing pieces she contributed, and for bringing in Sara whose writing blew me away every time. The Newsletter was a lot of work for me but getting to read Sara, Melvin, Lauren and Hema’s articles made it all worth it!

I would certainly thank Benjamin for all he did on Twitter to bring eyes to the operation, for writing so many great pieces, bringing in guests, and for helping to craft our Solidarity Statement (linked below). I would try my best to show appreciation and admiration for Christelle’s perspective, Diana’s caring voice, and Idil’s and Janaki’s incredible contributions. Amber was so great and so consistent for so long. Lani and the Project Sigma crew were so generous in sharing their incredible research. So many amazing folks who contributed on a regular basis like Howie, John, and Brett. Of course, I would personally thank Chase and Casey for writing and then curating with me back when we used to call it editing. They kept at it for years and well into the pandemic and were both so great and contributed so much to the community. I’d have to mention all the guest writers too, and all the people who came before me that made it possible. Whoa! No way I could do that and give everyone their due. 😣

I could write about the difficulty we had keeping the Newsletter going during the pandemic. I mean, I was freaking out. District telling me to switch to online, downloading Zoom, students messaging me, a 4-year old and a 1-year old wildin’ out in the living room, and I’m like, “What’s going to happen with the Newsletter?!” And then we just kinda kept it going! It’s amazing to me. Credit to everyone who was involved at the time. I don’t know how we did it. I’ll never forget how, when we were short on articles for the March 17th edition, Lauren wrote a whole Newsletter on her own!

Then, a couple months later, in the wake of George Floyd’s killing our writing team constructed a Statement of Solidarity and doubled down on our mission to do better. When we returned the following fall we were stronger and better than ever. The world was sick (COVID raged on) and tired (of racism and police brutality), but the Newsletter never flinched. Instead, we grew stronger and had more resolve than ever. That feels like something worth mentioning. I think …

Or, I could write about the amazing articles we’ve had over the last few years. We’ve had incredible writers y’all! I could pull highlights from the last few years and share them. I mean, that’s what the Newsletter was all about when I first started. At that time lots of math educators were starting to blog and tweet and share. The MTBoS was growing and the Newsletter was there to spread the word. Back then it was Michael, Chris, Megan, Carl, Kent, Sahar, Audrey, Jenise, Andrew and Andrew, Ashli, Graham, Brian, and of course Wendy. I’m lucky that I got to edit for Wendy. She was so great. We miss you Wendy.

Over the years a lot of things changed. It became harder to pull highlights from blogs and Twitter, but our writers adapted and found ways to share their own perspectives while still uplifting the words and the work of others.

I’d love to take the opportunity to point folks back to some of my favorite editions:

  • The 8/25/20 edition when Lauren wrote about “Seeing Systems” and Sara shared “A love letter to radical math teachers.
  • The 11/2/20 edition on Election Day when Melvin asked “Who Counts?” Melvin and Lauren agreed that “Math is Political,” and Hema and Lani reminded us take care of ourselves.
  • The 8/24/21 edition with highlights from the 2020-21 school year.
  • The 11/30/21 edition with Sara’s powerful interview with Dr. Belin Tsinnajinnie.
  • Idil’s #GMD Reflects Series in the 10/5/2112/14/212/8/22 and 4/5/22 editions.
  • The 5/3/22 edition where Sara shared her journey in Mathematics.
  • And so many more …

I could share some of my favorite moments too:

From Sara,

from Grace,

from Melvin,

from Lauren,

from Hema,

and also from Hema.

So much fantastic content. So many important questions! I was lucky to be the curator, just so I got to read it all, and I always felt blessed to be able to share it with the community. So many great writers. So many great people… 🤯

I could write about my perspective on why the Newsletter stopped running and why the GMD leadership decided to close up shop. That would be tough. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t what we wanted.

From my perspective it just kind of happened. Or maybe better to say it stopped happening. We could get webinar presenters, but post-pandemic we struggled to get people to come to them. We could get people who wanted to write for the Newsletter, but it was hard for them to find the time and find content to pull from. When the Newsletters went out, they often didn’t get traction, feedback, or interaction. Idil’s #GMDReflects series was amazing, but it didn’t spark the interest it deserved, at least not where I could find it.

I know there are a lot of people out there who love the GMD, but not as many were interacting with content we were putting out, and even fewer were interested in jumping on board to help. Maybe we missed something, maybe we went about it wrong, but we were always asking for help. I don’t think it’s anybody’s fault. It was the natural progression of a volunteer organization that couldn’t find enough volunteers in a profession where the most important players (teachers) don’t have a lot of time to create or interact with the product. I don’t have the answers or know anything, this is just my perspective.

I feel like I deserve some blame too. My hope was to build up an amazing collection of writers and then hand the Newsletter over to them. But as time wore on it became clear that the handoff wasn’t going to be easy. Meanwhile I was worn thin: teaching through a pandemic, raising a family, leading a department, and focusing on my own craft for the sake of the fantastic young people I’ve been blessed to teach. I’m willing to take some blame! But it wasn’t easy…

Should I write about that? Feels a little scary. 🫣

If I did write anything, I would HAVE to thank ALL THE PEOPLE.

And why am I thanking them? Personally?? I mean, it was never about me. But, then again, I guess it kinda was. If the Newsletter failed to go out on a given week whose fault would that be. For me, it felt like mine. So every time someone crafted an article it meant that another week had gone by where I hadn’t messed tit up! And every time that article was really good (our writers started made a habit of this) it made me feel like we were doing something good or even great. And so, I’m forever grateful and appreciative of the folks who wrote and curated with me over the years.

I’m also immensely grateful for the relationships that we built over the years. There’s a special place in my heart for every educator I’ve worked with on this project. I guess that’s why this tweet stung a bit. Maybe we weren’t a community like the MTBoS or the TMCers, but we were something. For a while there, I think we were really something! I mean, here are the archives, there is some PD gold in there! If you just tuned in for the finale, GO BACK and watch [read] the seasons!!!

If I did write anything I would want to remind everyone that the writers were volunteering their time and energy to help and grow the entire community. They didn’t do it for me (obviously), they did it for us all! We should all thank them. And if we are thanking them, I’d have to name them. The more I think about it, I really would have to name everyone. I could go through the archives. It would only take a couple of hours. Those folks deserve their flowers for all the work they put in for the community! I’d have to try …

Oh man. No way I could write anything. I’d have to write everything! 

I’m scared to write anyway. Writing is hard. I’d probably say “amazing” and “incredible” like 1000 times. Shout out to the writers. So much admiration and appreciation for what they do and what they’ve done for us all.

Lucky for me I’m just the curator. I don’t have to write anything. 😥😅✌️

It only took a couple of hours…

This is every name I could find that either edited or wrote articles in the order they first appeared in the Newsletter, beginning with Michael Pershan, who started it all! These are the folks who made this possible!

Michael Pershan 💐 Chris Robinson 💐 Megan Schmidt 💐 Kent Haines 💐 Carl Oliver 💐 Megan Hayes-Golding 💐Wendy Menard 💐 Sahar Khatri 💐 Audrey McLaren 💐 Andrew Stadel 💐 Andrew Gael 💐 Ashli Black 💐 Graham Fletcher 💐 Jenise Sexton 💐 David Wees 💐 John Stevens 💐 Mike Rosenfeld  💐 Brian Bushart  💐 Matthew Engle 💐 Meg Craig 💐 Chase Orton 💐 Bridget Dunbar 💐 Casey McCormick 💐 Lisa Winer 💐 Steve Gnagni 💐Anna Blinstein 💐 Erick Lee 💐 Matthew Oldridge 💐 Amber Thienel 💐 Rebecca Davis 💐

Continuing in order of appearance I (selfishly) break here, the place in the list where I took on the lead role. An extra flower from me for y’all. 🥹 It was such a pleasure to be in this space with you. Thank you so so much!

Diana McClean 💐 Howie Hua 💐 Melvin Peralta 💐 Marian Dingle 💐 Becky Bob-Waksberg 💐 Grace Chen 💐 Ilana Horn 💐 Nadav Ehrenfeld 💐 Christelle Rocha 💐 Hema Khodai 💐 Benjamin Dickman 💐 Lauren Baucom 💐 Jessica Moses 💐 Patricia Buenrostro 💐Samantha Marshall 💐 John Rowe 💐 Katherine Schneeberger McGugan 💐 Brette Garner 💐 Bethany Lockhart 💐 Lara Jasien 💐 Karli Orr 💐 Lizi Metts 💐 Allison Krasnow 💐 Sara Rezvi 💐 Nasriah Morrison 💐 Joseph Ochiltree 💐 Paige 💐 Maria Aguilera 💐 Idil Abdulkadir 💐 Courtney Gibbons 💐 Barbara Fantechi 💐 Monica VanDieren 💐 Brendan W. Sullivan 💐  Holland White 💐 Nicole Fletcher 💐 Brandie E. Waid 💐 Dee Crescitelli 💐 Janaki Nagarajan 💐 Brett Parker 💐 Darryl Yong 💐 Shelby Strong 💐 Casey Gordon 💐

I hope I didn’t miss anyone…

Deep breath…

#pushsend

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The Last Run Continues – May 16, 2023

Curated By Nate Goza @thegozaway
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Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight at 9:00 PM EST

Building Thinking Classrooms: Six Years Later

Presented by Peter Liljedahl

In this session, Leigh Nataro and Peter Liljedahl engage in a conversation about what has changed and what is new with regards to Building thinking Classrooms since his first Global Math Department presentation in March 2017.

If you have questions for Peter, we will try to ask them during the webinar! Send them to Leigh at globalmathdepartment@gmail.com.

Unfortunately this session is full! As always we will be recording the session and it will soon be available on BigMarker, YouTube, and in podcast form.

For those of you who are registered click here to view the webinar!

Register for Our Final Webinar on 5/30 at 9:00 PM EST

Finding Joy in Math

Presented by Howie Hua

It is common for a math educator to hear “I’m not a math person” or “Oh, I hate math.” How can we show that math as a subject is something to go towards rather than avoid? In this talk, we will discuss ways of finding joy in doing math inside and outside of the classroom.

Click here to register for this webinar!

#GMDWrites Again!

Taking Care and Caution with Data Literacy
By: Lizi Metts

Data has become an integral part of our society and culture – from the constant creation of data on mobile devices to the everyday use of data in media and news coverage of current events, politics, and public health. The newfound ubiquity of data opens up opportunities for relevant and meaningful contextual engagement of mathematics using data and data analysis practices and has prompted calls to support students’ data literacy and to modernize mathematics curricula. By ‘data literacy,’ I mean the necessary skills and abilities to access, make sense of, interpret, critique, represent, and ethically use data. As data has become more and more a part of our social world, it’s becoming more apparent that data literacy is important for students – for their lives now and for their futures outside of our classrooms. Data literacy is becoming increasingly necessary for democratic participation as well as economic success, as data is used in a variety of economic contexts and the creation of Big Data careers.

There is a lot of potential here for mathematics education to keep up with these modern needs. Data Science curriculum developers and supporters contrast data science to traditional mathematics learning pathways in which algebra and geometry lay the foundation for calculus. Indeed, there are numerous data science curricula available for teachers to implement and activities like “Data Talks” (think number talks, but with data visualizations) that make incorporating data literacy accessible to math teachers. In my own teaching, I fell in love with teaching statistics. It felt mathematically meaningful but also rich and engaging for my students. I began to incorporate real data into my lessons, whether students were collecting their own data for my AP Statistics class, or I sourced data to create function models for Algebra II and Pre-Calculus, I saw data as an opportunity to make mathematics matter to my students. However, this work was also really complex, both mathematically and socially – finding data, trying to support my students to engage with messier numbers, and opening up discussion about the realities of our social world. My own experience in teaching data literacy has led me to approach the broad and urgent uptake of data science education with a sense of caution.

Problematic Roots in Statistics

Statistics, as an area of study, offers a formalized and rigorous lens through which one can investigate real-world questions and data. Furthermore, statistics standards are embedded in school mathematics standards starting in grade six, creating curricular opportunities for supporting students’ data literacy. However, the language, logic, and philosophy of statistics (and especially the canonical ideas in statistics that have made their way into school standards) are entangled with eugenics and white supremacy. For example, three major statisticians, Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Ronald Fisher, made substantial and long lasting contributions that have shaped the discipline. These contributors however, were also eugenicists, and were motivated by providing scientific and mathematical evidence of white superiority (to learn more, check out Aubrey Clayton’s 2020 article, “How Eugenics Shaped Statistics”).

Galton was responsible for foundational understandings of regression and correlation and advanced the concept of normal distribution to model the variation of human abilities. These inventions were based on his understanding of race and white superiority – he not only centered whiteness in his models, but he also used his models to argue for racial hierarchies. Pearson has been credited with improving the theoretical rigor of statistics with the introduction of significance tests. In particular, he brought about the Chi-square test to measure the deviation between empirical results and the theoretical distribution. This “scientific” definition of difference was an important and dangerous part of an argument for white racial superiority. These logics were furthered by Fisher who promoted significance testing as “objective basis” and introduced a gatekeeping logic for statistics as a discipline: “A profession must have power to select its own   members, rigorously to exclude all inferior types” (Fisher, 1917). Statistics and data analysis practices are contextual and socio-historically situated, and by inviting students to engage in this kind of mathematical practice, they too will contend with contextual and socio-historical dimensions.

Reimagining Data Literacy

It is dangerous to ignore the ways data literacy is defined by a culture of power that has weaponized data in the past. As data science continues to gain momentum and math education recenters on data literacy, there is potential to invite new and more affirming and inclusive epistemologies. For example in their book, Data Feminism, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein offer an  emergent framework for changing data practices and discourse in service of equity and justice. Framing data as a tool to examine and critique power, they define seven principles of data feminism:

  1. Examine power – how does power operate in the world?
  2. Challenge  power – how can we challenge unequal power structures and move towards justice?
  3. Elevate emotion and embodiment – how can we learn and know in different ways, including how we live and feel in our own bodies?
  4. Rethink binaries and hierarchies – how are binary systems of counting and classification used to perpetuate oppression?
  5. Embrace pluralism – who can we learn from?
  6. Consider context – where does data come from? For what purpose was it created? What goals does it serve?
  7. Make labor  visible – who were the many hands involved in the creation and analysis of data?

Data feminism is an example of rigorous treatment of data that makes space for and values multiple ways of knowing and takes seriously the social and historical context of data creation and use. This kind of approach makes it possible to marry authentic disciplinary data practices with expansive and experiential ways of knowing and learning.

A more just and expansive approach, however, is not a given. Without care and caution, data literacy can be used to uncritically serve meritocratic and capitalistic goals. Data literacy might make mathematics more relevant or interesting, but to whom and for whom? How important is access and relevance if ultimately, it serves the needs of whiteness while continuing the cycle of oppression? Therefore, we are on the edge of a precipice – to allow data literacy to function as mathematical proficiency has historically, or to take the opportunity to disrupt the status quo and to use data for justice and liberation.

Wisdom I’ve Learned During My Time In GMD

Since 2016, I’ve had the honor to write and curate for the GMD newsletter and present a GMD webinar. I’ve learned much from this community. And for my final submission, I would like to share some.

The unfortunate reality is that we work in a system of math education that values test scores as the ultimate metric of success and progress. But this focus on raising test scores creates math classrooms that reward mimicry, answer-getting, and passive thinking. Students wait to be told what to learn and how to learn it. The focus on test scores diminishes their identity, reducing them down to test scores that need to be raised. This focus also diminishes our own identity and erodes our passion. None of us became math teachers because we’re passionate about raising test scores and training students to be test-takers. We are motivated by more noble calls to action—our vision of equity and seeing all of our students thriving in math class.

Teaching is a craft we learn best through each other.

We work in a system of silos—school buildings, separate campuses, grade levels, bell schedules, and especially our classroom walls. These silos threaten our sense of well-being because we often find ourselves without the collegial relationships and the co-thinking conversations we need to help each other thrive as teachers. But if the GMD has taught me anything, it’s that we are capable of directing our own professional development and we’re capable of becoming active partners in each other’s professional growth.

But only if we’re willing to leave our silos. Which brings me to my last piece of wisdom I’ve learned from others:

Seek vantage—particularly from the student perspective.

By far, the most powerful way to accelerate our own learning is to spend time in other math classrooms. It’s how we can reclaim control over our professional growth and learn how to activate our own sense of agency. Freed from the cognitive demands of teaching, we can begin to shift our perspective on what’s going on in math classrooms. We can watch math class from the student perspective and tap into their experience. And from this vantage in the room, we can see missed opportunities more clearly. And we begin to think of the missed opportunities that may be occurring in our own classrooms.

  • How are we showing our students we believe they’re capable? Who is doing the thinking in the room?
  • How effectively are we elevating student voices? How are we centering marginalized voices?
  • Who holds the authority for learning? How is authority shared with students? How do they have ownership over their own learning?
  • How are we valuing multiple perspectives in the room? Do all of our students feel like they belong in math class and have something to contribute?

Let’s teach math together!

I know the Global Math Department reaches far and wide, and geography may work against us. But I’m earnest. Let’s teach math together! And afterwards, let’s share a meal and share some stories about what we’ve learned on our teaching journey. Since November of 2020, I’ve been living a nomad life in my tiny home on wheels called Stoop. And when I can, I love to stop in towns and teach math with folks. You can find out more about that story here.

See you down the road!

Chase Orton
Chaseorton.com
@mathgeek76
@thetravelingstoop

Learning from Black Feminist Mathematics Pedagogies:
How positionality influences interpretations of mathematics curricula
We — Marlena (@MarlenaEanes), Lara (@LaraJasien), and Mike (@MichaelLolkus) — are prior teachers committed to improving mathematical experiences for marginalized students at scale. Marlena is a second-year doctoral student at Vanderbilt University studying under Dr. Nicole Joseph (@profnicolej) in the Joseph’s Mathematics Education Lab (JMEL), a lab with a special focus on Black girls and women (BGW), their identity development, and experiences in mathematics. Lara is a researcher at CPM Educational Program and Mike is a curriculum writer there.

The three of us came together to engage in a research project aimed at understanding how a secondary mathematics curriculum could disrupt patterns of injustice in mathematics education. We have taken up Dr. Joseph’s Black Feminist Mathematics Pedagogies (BlackFMP) framework to guide our analysis of CPM’s new Inspiring Connections curriculum, which has an explicit goal of supporting teachers to be culturally responsive to their students as they practice ambitious mathematics instruction.

We are learning a lot from our collective work — we continue to learn about the vision and implications of BlackFMP, curriculum design, each other, and ourselves. We share our experiences doing this curricular research and the important implications for teachers as we reflect on our teaching experiences throughout the research process. We structured this article as a pseudo-interview, with questions that we mutually agreed were important to answer. Our responses to these questions are not off-the-cuff but instead are considered responses. Overall, we hope this article gives you insight into — or at least spurs you to reflect on — how your experiences might influence how you interpret the purpose of different aspects of your curriculum based on the potential impact that it has on students.

1. How did BlackFMP become your framework for analysis? Why BlackFMP?

We chose BlackFMP because it is one of the few frameworks that explicitly addresses how to disrupt injustice in mathematics education. We are familiar with and value other mathematics-specific equity tools including those available through https://equitablemath.org/, an organization promoted by leading math-ed organizations such as Achieve the Core.

What we really appreciated about BlackFMP was the way it builds on mathematics education research and shows how the important, decades-long scholarship on ambitious mathematics instruction is necessary but insufficient for making meaningful changes in mathematics education at scale. We also appreciated the way BlackFMP drew attention to Black girls specifically, calling out the way that Black girls’ marginalization is compounded by the ways they are racialized and gendered in mathematics classrooms, and United States society more broadly. BlackFMP taught us that it is important to attend to the needs of specific groups and the specific ways that they experience oppression in mathematics education if we hope to disrupt that oppression. At the same time, we think that attending to and designing against the ways that Black girls are marginalized in mathematics education will benefit all students. If we design for those who are marginalized first, rather than as an afterthought, everyone wins.

2. What is BlackFMP?

BlackFMP is a framework or a model for mathematics pedagogy that is grounded in the theory of intersectionality. To describe it at a very high level, intersectionality tells us that we must attend to the complex relationship between systems of power and oppression and multiple dimensions of someone’s identities (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality) if we want to understand the outcomes of social institutions like mathematics education. Building on this theory, Dr. Joseph builds BlackFMP from the four dimensions of Ambitious Mathematics Instruction, Academic and Social Integration, Robust Mathematics Identity, and Critical Consciousness & Reclamation. Below we provide a series of questions we synthesized based on how we apply these dimensions in our coding.

3. Who are you and how does your positionality inform how you see various dimensions of BlackFMP in mathematics curriculum?
Marlena: I am a Black, heterosexual, cis-gendered woman from the upper-class suburbs of Chicago. As a student, I attended predominantly white schools where I was the only Black girl in my grade for 6 years. My positionality impacted my career tremendously: I became a math teacher to become the representation within the classroom that I yearned for as a child. Due to my experiences as a learner being othered, as I code I frequently consider whether or not those students who are traditionally left out in math curricula will be seen and to which degree will they be seen. As a doctoral student, I frequently think about the ways in which whiteness is centered in math curricula and traditional ways of knowing and this informs how I see the dimensions of BlackFMP as a way to decenter whiteness in order to ensure that all students are welcomed in the math classroom.

Lara: I’m a white, heterosexual, cis-gendered woman who grew up with middle-class parents. My parents were divorced so I split my childhood between the city in CA’s bay area and rural life in South Dakota. I’ve also experienced trauma related to a childhood caregiver’s untreated mental illness and addiction/self-medication. This trauma made my early adult years a challenge and made me yearn for a career with meaning. My joint interest in mathematics and well-being led me to pursue mathematics teaching and eventually mathematics education research. It wasn’t until I became a high school math teacher in a community where my whiteness made me the minority that I began to realize my white privilege: my career trajectory of (what I count as) success despite the challenges I faced was not primarily an outcome of my hard work. When I use BlackFMP today to analyze mathematics curriculum, I remember who I was as a young teacher who was just starting to see her own unearned privilege as she taught students who saw her privilege very clearly. I think about all the ways I enacted the status quo with my students, and I draw on BlackFMP to help me see the ways a curriculum might have helped me do it differently.

Mike: I am a white, cis-gendered heterosexual man from the middle-class suburbs of a mid-sized city in Indiana. While my educational experiences were embedded in racially and economically diverse classrooms, I was awarded unearned privilege as I navigated life in a society normed by whiteness, maleness, and heterosexuality. I began to recognize the pervasiveness of my privilege through my partnerships with students and families as a high school mathematics teacher in New Jersey with a Black and Latinx student population. With my students in mind, I continued to push back against and learn more about practices that maintain white supremacy culture in mathematics classrooms through my doctoral program focused on teaching mathematics for social justice. Utilizing BlackFMP has supported my understanding of what can be centered in the immediate future when we actively work to decenter whiteness in secondary mathematics classrooms and work toward a more equitable and truly reimagined mathematics education.

4.  In what ways have your experiences as a mathematics teacher been reaffirmed or challenged through your interactions with and reflections on BlackFMP?

Marlena: BlackFMP has reaffirmed the ways in which I taught that humanized my students. Through our robust discussions, there have been times when I realized that classroom practices I attributed as cursory were not, rather, these were practices I implemented based on my positionality. BlackFMP has challenged the ways in which I viewed equity work in mathematics. I left corporate America for graduate school, after being burnt out from working in education, and I previously viewed equity work as futile. BlackFMP has reignited the hope that I have for equity in math education.

Lara: My experiences as a mathematics teacher have been given new clarity by BlackFMP – it gives me a new lens that helps me attune to the finer points of how instruction can be oppressive and/or liberatory. For example, BlackFMP tells me that critical consciousness isn’t enough: mathematics instruction needs to support students to reclaim mathematics as by and for them. I think what I have really gained out of my work with Dr. Joseph’s BlackFMP is rooted in my conversations with Marlena and Mike: we affirm each other’s intellectual contributions but also clarify, extend, and push back on each other’s ideas. I think it is essential in this kind of deep learning that we surround ourselves with people who are willing to take risks to challenge us. I wouldn’t have learned as much without them.

Mike: Broadly, reflecting on and analyzing CPM’s curriculum with BlackFMP has reaffirmed much of my mathematics pedagogy at the high school and collegiate levels. Most importantly, though, our conversations about BlackFMP have supported me in further recognizing how I perpetuated whiteness despite my good intentions. For instance, our team has had multiple conversations about growth and fixed mindsets, raising multiple questions, such as, Why is a growth mindset needed? and Who does a growth mindset serve? While I embraced the philosophy of and engaged my students in lessons about growth mindset as a high school teacher, this team and our analysis with BlackFMP has supported me to more critically interpret the hidden messages of growth mindset as an individual endeavor in which students, particularly those who are marginalized by a society normed by whiteness, must think themselves into achieving without attention toward the systemic barriers they face.

5. How has your thinking about equity in mathematics education changed since you began using BlackFMP to analyze a secondary mathematics curriculum?

Marlena: Prior to using BlackFMP to analyze curriculum, I saw equity work as either occurring in a vacuum or occurring at the surface level without truly attending to oppression and intersectionality. This work has allowed my thinking to grow beyond individual teachers and individual schools doing equity work, to consider how we can attend to equity in math education at the curriculum level.

Lara: I think one of the biggest things I have learned in this project has been the importance of “calling a thing a thing.” In a project, meeting, Marlena shared those words of her graduate advisor, Dr. Nicole Joseph. This has become our shared new standard for what counts as robust challenges to the status quo. I have come to realize that not “calling a thing a thing” actively perpetuates problematic narratives. For example, as Mike shared, growth mindset perpetuates the problematic narrative that perseverance is an individual endeavor and mindset is a problem to be fixed within individuals. Calling a thing a thing means naming the systemic practices that encourage students to develop a fixed mindset: standardized tests and college entrance exams, most grading practices, narrow ways of defining acceptable participation, etc. While I believe there is some power in the ideas of growth mindset (e.g., telling students they are gifted or smart can make them averse to taking risks and making mistakes and so not being gifted or smart anymore), the big picture of how the system and we as participants in it (as researchers, curriculum writers, teachers, etc.) encourage fixed mindsets has to be explicit and disrupted. Mindsets are just an example of this larger phenomenon of “calling a thing a thing!”

Mike: Prior to this project, I believed that only radical change to the mathematics education enterprise would result in truly equitable learning experiences. Engaging in conversations about and engaging in analyses with BlackFMP has supported my recognition of what changes are possible for supporting students to have more just experiences in secondary mathematics classrooms in the immediate future. I continue to reflect on the tension between radical, systemic change, and the role of incremental change that serves students in classrooms today, such as that of BlackFMP. Our project gives me hope for both.

6. What’s next?

Scholar Danny Martin has critiqued NCTM and the entire system of mathematics education, saying in essence that we need to tear the whole thing down and re-imagine it. He’s probably right. By focusing on BlackFMP, we take another tack, because, paraphrasing Dr. Joseph, kids are going to be in school on Monday. We want to make change that can support students today and tomorrow, but we also wonder, can BlackFMP be a tool to help us move toward re-imagining the system in Martin’s sense? One thing that we have seen that BlackFMP helps us do is name problems, and see when problems aren’t named. We frequently have conversations about what could have pushed a particular “author’s vision” (a portion of the curriculum that provides teachers with insights into the authors’ intent and strategies like pocket questions and math language routines) to be more robust by “calling a thing a thing.” Kimberlé Crenshaw — law scholar and coiner of the term intersectionality — said in her TEDtalk, “If you can’t name the problem then you can’t see the problem, and if you can’t see the problem then you pretty much can’t solve it.” As we continue to be able to see new things through our application of BlackFMP, we will continue to spread the word about what we learn. We encourage you to do the same by checking out podcasts (check out these two by Dr. Joseph for NCTM and NCSM) and exploring how the BlackFMP questions we shared influence your interpretations of curriculum.

Contribute to One of Our Final Newsletters

We’d like to hear from folks who have attended our Webinars over the years! If you’d like to share, use the prompt below:

How have the GMD newsletters or webinars impacted your teaching?
Share your thoughts (100 – 250 words is ideal) with us for inclusion in our Newsletter in May 2023.

We’d also like to give anyone who has written for us in the past to contribute a final article!

Please reach out on Twitter or send an email to globalmathdepartment@gmail.com if you’d like to contribute!

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Back for One Last Run – March 21, 2023

Curated By Nate Goza @thegozaway
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Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight at 9:15 PM EST

Using CODAP to Teach Statistics and Data Concepts

Presented by Hollylynne Lee

Come and engage with a free online data tool, CODAP, for exploring bigger datasets and learning key statistics and data practices and concepts. The activities shared will be appropriate for middle and high school students. Participants will also be introduced to a new professional learning platform for teachers (instepwithdata.org) to pursue their own goals for improving their teaching of statistics and data science.

Click here to register for this webinar! (Note the 9:15 start time.)

All Good Things Must …

The Global Math Department’s Final Run

Written by Leigh Nataro with Support from the GMD Board
The origin of the phrase “all good things must come to an end,” is not clear. However, the Global Math Department has been a very good thing and now it will be coming to an end. The GMD has helped to provide free quality PD for many teachers over the past 11 years. We will be ending with our last session on May 30th with the amazing math educator and TikTok creator, Howie Hua.

The first GMD webinar “Interactive Notebooks” was held on August 7, 2012 with 17 people in attendance and no email invitations were sent to invite people to attend.  People learned about the webinars the same way I learned about the webinars – through Twitter.  Megan Hayes-Golding organized and led many sessions in the early years of the GMD.  Initially webinars were not recorded for future viewing.  Webinar recordings began in 2014 and some of the recordings were turned into podcasts. Certificates of Attendance were transcribed for live webinar attendance beginning in 2018. To have the GMD reach a larger audience, video recordings of the webinars were uploaded to the GMD YouTube channel starting in May of 2020.

At some point during the pandemic our viewing spiked considerably with multiple webinars having between 100 – 200 people in attendance.  The number of recording views by-passed the number of live views and the most watched webinar recording of all time on our YouTube channel was “Using Delta Math for Distance Learning” by Zach Korzyk with over 5,000 views.  We were truly global with participants from Australia, Canada, Thailand, Turkey, India and Indonesia.

I have enjoyed hosting the GMD webinars over the past eight years and I am grateful to everyone who has contributed to hosting, presenting, booking speakers and writing newsletter content.  Although our formal community sharing via webinars is ending, I look forward to rewatching the webinars on the YouTube channel and continuing to learn and grow from the ideas that have been shared.

The Newsletter Too!

If you’ve missed the Newsletter this year, we’ve missed you too!

The first ever GMD Newsletter was sent out on April the 28th 2014. You can see it here! Shout out to the original subscriber, admin, and editor Michael Pershan! For 8 years we continued to put out a weekly (and eventually biweekly) Newsletter highlighting the goings on in the intersections of the math, education, and math education worlds. Our subscribership grew from one to nearly 2,000 during that time with nearly 20% of our subscribers from outside of the US. It was a great run and we thank all those of you who read and grew along with us. #GMDWrites!

We our planning to put out a few more editions of the Newsletter as we celebrate the end of the GMD’s fantastic run. As always, we are hoping to get some contributions from our readers and folks who have attended the Webinars. See the announcement below if you are interested!

Here’s the Webinar Lineup for the Rest of 2023 (and Forever)!

April 4
Street Data from Implementing Building Thinking Classrooms in Middle School
with Amy Chang

April 18
What We Learned About Math, Teaching, and Technology While Building Desmos
with Dan Meyer, Eli Luberoff and Team Desmos

May 2
Title TBD
with Nolan Fossum

May 16
Building Thinking Classrooms 6 Years Later
with Peter Liljedahl

May 30
Title TBD
with Howie Hua
And Don’t Forget You Can Always See Old Webinars

Click here for the archives, get the webinars in podcast form, or visit our YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

Contribute to One of Our Final Newsletters

We’d like to hear from folks who have attended our Webinars over the years! If you’d like to share, use the prompt below:

How have the GMD newsletters or webinars impacted your teaching?
Share your thoughts (100 – 250 words is ideal) with us for inclusion in our Newsletter in May 2023.

We’d also like to give anyone who has written for us in the past to contribute a final article!

Please reach out on Twitter or send an email to globalmathdepartment@gmail.com if you’d like to get write.

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Visit our Website Visit our Website
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GMD Newsletter June 14, 2022

Curated By Nate Goza @thegozaway
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Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight at 9:00 PM EST

The Status Quo in High School Math is Unacceptable

Presented by Eric Milou

Today, it seems as if nearly everyone agrees that high school mathematics needs to change. For far too long, math has not worked for far too many students. Math has not changed substantially in my lifetime, nor has it changed substantially for most students, teachers & schools. It is clearly an issue – and it is time to discuss and make serious changes.

Click here to register for this webinar!

Coming Up on 6/28

Data Rich with Diagnostics

Presented by Kat Hendry

I love a good story, more so, a data rich story. We live in a world of data…but do we always use it and use it effectively? As educators, data informs our practice but we are often plagued with the task of how to manage it, review it, and break it down. Leaving us to ask how does diagnostic data support us?

Click here to register for this webinar!

#GMDWrites

Resting and Reflecting: An Invitation to a GMD Community Conversation

By: Sara Rezvi and Janaki Nagarajan
Dear Global Math Department Community,
We begin with acknowledging that this school year has been intense for many math educators in the United States. Some highlights: Florida rejecting math textbooks under the guise of anti ‘critical race theory’, anti-SEL sentiments, and anti-trans legislation bills sweeping states throughout the country with ~ 240 bills being put forth as of March 2022, the tragedy and massacre of 4th grade Latinx children and two educators in Uvalde, TX by an 18 year old man armed with an assault rifle, and the subsequent increased calls for teachers to be armed. While this list is by no means comprehensive, it points to the sheer heaviness teachers in the last year have faced. Teachers (and math teachers in particular) are not a monolith, nor can and should be treated as a universal, homogenized group of people with the same perspectives and politics; however, the structural realities impacting the teaching profession have us reflecting on the culmination of this year.

We wrote this short piece as an invitation to reflect as a community rather than solely centering our own thoughts about our specific educational roles. For context, Janaki is an elementary school teacher in the Seattle area and has been teaching for 3 years. Sara is a former high school math teacher, current program director of the Math Circles of Chicago and a doctoral candidate in math ed.

The end of this tumultuous and heartbreaking year has left us with questions, complicated feelings, tensions, and numbness for the both of us. It has also given us pause to reflect on the subtle moments of joy, serenity, and hope that comes with working with children.

We invite the GMD community to engage in the questions and resources we have included here and to offer additions as well if you so choose as an attempt to reflect beyond this piece and with(in) the community so many of us might need to process this year. We also invite readers to engage in a slowchat using the hashtag  #GMDReflects (and tag us @/arsinoepi and @/janaki_aleena) with A# as a response to the questions below [Example: A3: #GMDReflects and tag us]. We hope to engage with you all as we take stock of the realities of this year as a community. We ask folks to communicate in good faith as we intend to do the same.

As an overarching question, we ask folks to consider this as a framework for the remaining questions below, which is, how do we intentionally reflect on our math teaching practice without falling into the trap of white (and white adjacent) saviorism and complicity? How are we intentionally choosing to be ‘key makers and not gatekeepers’ (Marian Dingle, @/DingleTeach) (especially in a field like math that has and continues to be mired in exclusivity?) See: Lorena Escoto German’s “Textured Teaching: A Framework for Culturally Sustaining Practices

Q1: As writers and educators, what is our role in sharing the stories of others (i.e. when and how should we share, and when shouldn’t we?), knowing the stories will be filtered through our own lenses and biases as the writer, and filtered again through the lenses and biases of the readers?

Q2: Consider the nuanced practice of boundaries in professional-emotional-caretaking settings. How do we establish where I end and you begin? With colleagues? With families? With self? What are the complexities that must be attended to in the emotional labor that is so often required amongst those who have been racialized and gendered into caretaker roles (such as teaching) without losing ourselves in the process? What intentional and productive boundaries do you intend on setting next year? Similarly, how do we recognize and mitigate the impact of emotional labor of marginalized students navigating math classroom spaces?  See: Racialized and Gendered Labor in Students’ Responses to Precalculus and Calculus Instruction, Battey, et al, 2022)

Q3: How do we seek to grow, reflect and push ourselves professionally while respecting our own well-being? What role do privileged teachers and students have in centering the well-being of historically marginalized teachers and students? What are some examples or actionable steps your organization or individuals within it took this year towards making this happen? See: Tony Sun’s Thread on Supporting Trans Children (@/poetpedagogue)

Q4: What is the difference between a responsibility and an obligation? How does that show up in mathematics educational spaces in the United States? Is there a difference? What is our responsibility towards the communities and children we have chosen to serve and truly engage in the ‘deep practice of listening’ (paraphrased from Thich Nhat Hanh “From Mindfulness to Heartfulness, p. 49)? This question inspired by Christina Torres Cawdery (@/bibliophile)’s tweet screenshotted with permission below.


Q5: In light of the ongoing alt-right attacks on LGBTQIA+, Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latinx children, as educators how do we show up to affirm the humanities of the most vulnerable in mathematical spaces? See: Alex Shevrin Venet’s “Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education” or Dr. Brandie Waid’s website thequeermathematicsteacher.com.

Q6: Related to the tweet screenshotted with permission from Annie Tan @/AnnieTangent below – How do we teach in ways that center student knowledge and expertise in the midst of standardized curriculum and assessment systems, that prioritize certain types of knowledge and expertise that are born from white supremacy culture? (Tema Okun, Dismantling Racism Works)


Q7:  Related to Janaki’s tweet screenshotted below, our final question is where (or to whom) have you looked to for hope and inspiration this year? What helped you grow? Reflect? Expand? (with respect to your math teaching practice). Do you have any book recommendations, podcasts, readings, artwork, music, or any other sources that have kept you afloat this school year? How did it help you?


We hope that in the midst of all the heaviness this year, you are able to find a bit of peace and healing this summer. If these questions resonate with you please chat with us on Twitter using #GMDReflects per the instructions above.

We close this piece with a few lyrics from an old Nirvana song and ask you to come as you are.
As a friend.
As a friend.

Take care and rest well this summer,

Janaki and Sara

Next Year We Want Your Voices!

We’d love to share this space with teachers and their students who feel compelled to share with our community!

Please reach out on Twitter or send an email to globalmathdepartment@gmail.com if you’d like to get involved or contribute an article (or articles).

Check Out the Webinar Archives

Click here for the archives, get the webinars in podcast form, or visit our YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

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GMD Newsletter – May 3, 2022

Curated By Nate Goza @thegozaway
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Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight at 9:00 PM EST

What is Experience First, Formalize Later (EFFL)?

Presented by Luke WilcoxLindsey Gallas, and Sarah Stecher

In this presentation, we will present a few lessons that have been developed for a student-centered classroom. In these lessons, students work in small groups to experience the learning before the teacher formalizes the learning with definitions and formulas. Using this learning structure, students engagement and retention increases, leading to better conceptual understanding over rote memorization.

Click here to register for this webinar!

Coming Up on 5/17

Rethinking the Traditional Warm Up

Presented by Juan Gómez

Typical warm up problems in math class often take longer than expected. How do you invite students to join classroom thinking without taking a significant amount of class time? This presentation will show some ways to invite students to find patterns, activate prior learning, and join classroom thinking.

Click here to register for this webinar!

#GMDWrites: Sara’s Story

Sara’s Story

Written by Sara Rezvi for Sines of Disability (sinesofdisability.com)

Content Warning: Includes references to hard topics including abuse, harm, and PTSD.


In the Islamic faith, knowledge is considered sacred. According to tradition, the first Quranic word revealed to the Prophet (peace be upon him) was ‘iqra’, which quite simply means to read. My parents, and particularly my father, encouraged the learning of mathematics as one avenue of beautiful study. A lifelong journey that began with dollar store fridge magnets and a Chicago Public Library card led to majoring in mathematics, where I was exposed to both profound intellectual insights and systemic harm. From there, I went on to obtain a Masters in teaching, and had the honor of teaching children about a discipline that has captivated me for so long as a middle and high school math teacher. After teaching for close to a decade in a variety of different settings (public, private, and charter) along with different school districts (New York City, Chicago, and Mexico City), I left my career to pursue a doctoral degree in mathematics curriculum and instruction, with a concentration in gender and sexuality and to work at a non-profit organization. As program director of the Math Circles of Chicago, I work within a wide range of communities to support the joyful exploration of mathematics with teachers, families, and students from underrepresented and marginalized backgrounds. While I have outlined in brief my connection and journeying with mathematics here, such sketches need to be filled in with greater and more painstaking detail. In my case, those details revolve around abuse, trauma, suicidal ideation, self-harm, financial precarity, and the slow but steady unwinding of deep intergenerational pain as a first generation, Pakistani/American, disabled, queer woman.

What role have disability and ableism played in your mathematical journey?

The immediate reaction to responding to this question is one that words cannot describe, a slow movement of air and lungs struggling to make sense of this fragmentation. It remains perpetually trapped in my throat – a keening, shaking ache.

According to the DSM-5 Diagnostic Criteria for PTSD, I meet the following symptoms:

  1. Exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence
  2. Recurrent, involuntary, and intrusive distressing memories of the traumatic event(s).
  3. Persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others, or the world (e.g., “I am bad,” “No one can be trusted,” “The world is completely dangerous,” “My whole nervous system is permanently ruined”).
  4. Persistent inability to experience positive emotions (e.g., inability to experience happiness, satisfaction, or loving feelings).
  5. Marked alterations in arousal and reactivity associated with the traumatic event(s), beginning or worsening after the traumatic event(s) occurred
    1. Reckless or self-destructive behavior.
    2. Hypervigilance.
    3. Problems with concentration.
    4. Sleep disturbance

Complex PTSD includes these criteria but also has the additional factor of the trauma being continuous, ongoing, and intertwined – in short, there is no moving on because the trauma never ceases to fully end. I was diagnosed with C-PTSD a few years ago, though I have been struggling with the realities of the condition for most of my adult life. While the DSM criteria above are helpful to a certain extent, they do not quite capture the fullness of what it has meant to go through this experience. After intensive therapy these past few years, I am recognizing that this diagnosis requires accepting two interrelated conditions. I must carefully attend to the nebulous terrain of my mental health as a lifelong endeavor but also do my best to live in joyful, intentional, and conscientious praxis. Self-awareness, movement, intention, mutual reciprocity, access to resources, gentleness and acceptance with(in) community have allowed me to start internalizing these hard-won insights. And so, I am finally able to write these words here, in the hopes that they may serve others as well.

Trauma does not occur in a vacuum. For me, it is a direct consequence of interlocking systems of oppression (Combahee River Collective, 1977) working in concert with one another to produce outcomes to benefit the few at the expense of the many. In a previous publication, I, along with my sister-scholars, have attempted to map how systemic oppression undergirded by white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and xenophobia have been reified in our respective attempts at entering the STEM fields (Madden et al, 2020). My attempt to locate these interlocking systems of oppression were constructed below in Figure 4.3. At the time of the original publication, I was not yet ready to admit to nor accept my neurodivergence and C-PTSD symptoms as necessarily interconnected within my identity map. This is why it does not appear in the figure below though I hope to rectify my reluctance to name the impact of ableism in my mathematical journey in this piece.

I focus my initial excavation on my childhood and its role in my C-PTSD diagnosis. South Asian patriarchy as experienced in my close-knit Pakistani community ensured that the spiritual, emotional, and sometimes physical abuse the female members of my family endured by my father was ongoing and continuous up until his death in 2020. This was generally accepted as a personal problem to be resolved in the home and thus upheld by community withdrawal and negligence. While I was more or less groomed to fit certain cultural expectations both within and external to community parameters such as ‘loving mother’, ‘dutiful and self-sacrificial eldest daughter’, ‘docile caretaker’, and ‘devout woman’, I refused to fully entertain these demands. My refusal to partake in my own oppression resulted in erasure, shaming, abandonment, disavowal, and further entrenchment of ongoing harm.

As first-generation, Muslim immigrants to the United States, my parents hoped to preserve a way of life that was increasingly threatening to disappear due to white supremacist conscriptions of assimilationism and allegiance to adopting anti-Black, Asian model minority myths – a straddling of amorphous and fluid boundaries, and a negotiation of self, identity, and social location – what bell hooks describes as being within ‘the margin…as part of the whole but outside the main body’ (1989, p. 20).

As someone raised within notions of community and caretaking, I respect and honor their sacrifice, dedication, and willingness to leave everything they knew in Pakistan to create a different life in the United States. However, I am aware of the liminality of time and history, how we carry it with us and through us – our skin, blood and bone contain both the resilience and beauty of our ancestors and the deep wounds they were unable to heal from due to British occupation, colonization and the violent 1947 partition of India and Pakistan as separate and sovereign nation-states (Dalrymple, 2015; Khan, 2008). Interspersed in my family’s history is the unnamed but acute awareness of mental health issues that continued to trespass upon each generation. South Asian taboos prevented these conversations from fully being addressed or known, despite whispered longstanding familial histories of suicide, sexual assault, depression, and abuse.

When we speak about intergenerational trauma, we must also speak about the reproduction and reification of untreated mental health issues that refract through immigrant South Asian families and communities attempting to survive in an increasingly violent xenophobic society that operates on federal, state, local, and individual levels to ensure white hegemonic control (Hilal, 2021; Lughod, 2011; Kishi, 2015). Statistically, the highest rate of suicide deaths (CDC, 2008) can be attributed to young female Asian Americans and Pacific-Islanders (15-24 years old), a social location I occupied for many years as a formerly suicidal person.

Ableism & History

A working definition of ableism developed in community by Talila Lewis and disabled Black/negatively racialized folks is defined as follows:

“Ableism: a system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in eugenics, anti-Blackness, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. This systemic oppression that leads to people and society determining people’s value based on their culture, age, language, appearance, religion, birth or living place, “health/wellness”, and/or their ability to satisfactorily re/produce, “excel” and “behave”. You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism.” (Lewis, et al, 2022)

One cannot emerge from childhood abuse without feeling the humming heaviness ever present in one’s veins. In 2002, I began the study of mathematics as a bruised and empty shell socially conditioned to overachieve, hyper aware of the belief in my own imagined shortcomings, and trained to fawn and people-please to my own detriment. In retrospect, it is not exactly surprising that entering the teaching workforce (and later, academia) built on interconnected ableist mechanisms of gendered and racialized exploitation further exacerbated the trauma I had already endured. In the next few sections of this piece, I connect how my past experiences of childhood abuse endured and expanded under the systemic conditions I found myself navigating in both academic and professional mathematics spaces.

Intersectionality is a framework and lens that can help uncover how ableism is woven into the racialized and gendered treatment of women of color in STEM. Black women scholars such as Kimberle Crenshaw (1991), Sojourner Truth (1863), bell hooks (1984; 2000), and Patricia Hills-Collins (1990) along with the 1977 Combahee River Collective statement have been at the pioneering forefront of theorizing how differential systems of hierarchy and oppression interact and reify one another. Adopting an intersectional framework towards understanding how disability, race, gender, class, ability and sexuality are in constellation is critically important in contextualizing how mathematics is experienced within institutions and can be extended to the diverse but interconnected realities of Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous women as is evidenced by the work of feminist scholars such as Sarah Ahmed (2014; 2015), Haunani Kay-Trask (2005), Cherrie Morraga (1986), and Gloria Anzaldua (2007).

Analyzing interlocking systemic oppression is dynamic and at times, contradictory – one of the reasons why it is so incredibly difficult to name these processes is because of the need to carefully and thoughtfully attend to contextual realities. For this reason, I am focusing particularly on how intersectionality can provide a lens through which we can interrogate how neurodivergence is entangled with my lived experiences as an immigrant, South Asian, queer woman in STEM.

Ableism, CPTSD, and Mathematics

In the following table, I attempt to outline the intersection of ableism and its interaction with C-PTSD in mathematics learning spaces as a gendered and racialized person. I will preface this by stating that this is by no means comprehensive, but is an attempt at naming what I have kept silent for too long. I recognize that in this act of naming, of illuminating, and of heaving into existence is one action that I can engage in to repair and confront, and to recover and heal.

As I made my way through my undergraduate mathematics journey, my experience with childhood abuse and ongoing trauma was further exacerbated by my inability to address it in any meaningful capacity, a dark road carved out by multiple suicide attempts and the many razors slicing my body to dull the pain of daily existence.

Upon graduating and entering the teaching workforce as a twenty-something year old, I did my best to utilize the health insurance that I finally felt safe in accessing only to find that teaching full-time leaves no capacity to do anything but work a minimum of 9-12 hours per day including weekends, especially as an untried teacher in new settings. Now, at the age of 37, I am finally confronting the ongoing harm I’ve continuously experienced all these years at the intersections of mathematics, ableism, and racialized and gendered oppression along with my own complicity in unconsciously reproducing these circumstances.

The same violence that cannot be critiqued, that remains coercively unspoken, must never be held accountable. I have noticed that as soon as an attempt by an oppressed person is made to correct wrongs, the punishment for daring the attempt increases multifold. The oppressed person, thus, learns to be quiet, to be still, to freeze, to please, and to navigate a carefully cultivated fragile ‘calm’ in order to survive another day. As Arundhati Roy incisively observes – ‘there’s really no such as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.’

I think about this quote often and how my mental health waivers daily – an oscillation that feels less like a sine wave and more akin to a jagged piece-wise function. I am always already a knife’s edge away from falling into an anxious and panic-inducing void, an unmaking of my own making.  A strict combination of therapy, diet, and physical movement is slowly but intentionally allowing me to find a place where I feel stable, healthy, and able to handle the daily ups and downs. In that time, I have still managed to submit assignments on time, teach full course-loads as an adjunct instructor and teaching assistant, submit an IRB and successfully navigate qualifying exams, work multiple jobs, and prepare for an upcoming dissertation proposal defense.

And yet, we live under late-stage capitalism. We wade through the never-ending pressure to produce & to perform under the collusion of white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and ableism. As a disabled queer Muslim woman of color, I maintain defensive energy shields in my interactions unless I am absolutely certain that it is safe to lower them in predominantly white, cis-gendered, heteronormative, male, mathematical institutional spaces.

One might ask, how do I know that mathematics is an example of a white institutional space?

Simple.

I look at the walls.

They speak in their silence. The portraits and the photographs whisper to me, white man after white man, university hall after university hall, all wondering puzzlingly what on earth I am doing here.

Foucault (2012) theorizes that one goal of disciplinary societies built on surveillance is for individuals to internalize it. This manifests for me in the hypervigilance required to interact with the world at large and in mathematics communities in particular. A world that feels fragmented under the combined impacts of a failed government response to a global pandemic, the existential threat of climate change, and the mandate to produce and perform in spite of the overwhelming need to be human, to grieve as human, to cherish as human, and to reclaim as human.

I am not necessarily aware when I am practicing hypervigilance in mathematics spaces. It is a permanent anxiety, a nested surveillance of self and others. What can I say? How will it be transmuted into something not meant but presumed nevertheless? A critique described as an accusation. An unmet need rendered into a problem (Ahmed, 2014), in which I become the problem.  It was my therapist who noticed that when I spoke about the emotional and sometimes physical abuse that I’ve endured over the years, I frequently held my right hand to my throat. It’s as if my body unconsciously is trying to move me from silence to speech. I do so here in these words, on this paper, reflected in the swirling emotions I am dissociatively observing flow through me as they are rendered into existence on this document.

We have all been coerced into retelling the entrenched myth that racial hierarchies which privilege whiteness and capitalism as intertwined constructs will be our collective salvation. Ableism is embedded into these logics, where the demands of attending to academic hyperproductivity has been further enhanced under the pandemic. Our allegiance to maintaining this myth is destroying us insofar as we attempt to maintain it in academic institutions and beyond. We are like the ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail. We remain deeply unaware of what we are consuming because we have been conditioned to avoid confronting it structurally. A telling example of this is to simply look at who has been able to actively pursue research interests, attend virtual or in-person conferences, publish in journals, and continue enhancing their careers and who simply has not been able to keep up with ableist, racist and gendered expectations; in short, who has been kept safe from the mass disabling event of the global pandemic and who has been actively forced to endure its impact directly (Myers et al, 2020; Guarino & Borden, 2016).

Elsewhere, mathematics education research has increasingly focused on the lived experiences of women of color in STEM fields. Some findings include: (1) heightened microaggressions (gendered and/or racialized) (Brown, 2008; Kachchaf et al, 2015) through both covert and overt remarks towards women of color in STEM; (2) being subject to ‘hypervisibility’, which Ryland (2013) defines as ‘scrutiny based on perceived difference, which is usually (mis)interpreted as deviance, p. 2222’; and (3) the overreliance of student and privileged faculty alike to ‘perceive and expect female professors to be more nurturing than male professors are’ (Alayli, et al, 2018). How are these experiences potentially trauma-inducing events? How do we protect the most vulnerable from ongoing and continuous harm? When do we confront this reality and collectively wake up to the ongoing harm reproduced in academic communities to this day?  How do we ensure that disabled STEM scholars (and particularly non-binary and transgendered people and cis women of color) are treated with respect, grace, and reciprocity? For those that are granted institutional power and authority, how might these privileges be leveraged for a more radically aware and explicitly transformative mathematical community and ethic of care? Is that even possible?

I leave these as questions to the reader to explore and interrogate. I believe that this work can be meaningfully attended to and one that must be concretely addressed with leadership, vision, and hope centering the intersectional realities of disabled, gendered, sexualized, classed, and racialized people in STEM. In my retelling of the interstitial spaces of hurt and healing, I hope that these words inspire a more thoughtful reflection and institutional awareness of the work yet to be done and the radical yearning of claiming what must be done.

Thank you for reading and affirming – please know it comes directly from my heart to yours.
For a list of references please visit Sara’s page at the Sines of Disability website.

We Want Your Voices!

We’d love to share this space with teachers and their students who feel compelled to share with our community!

Please reach out on Twitter or send an email to globalmathdepartment@gmail.com if you’d like to get involved or contribute an article (or articles).

Check Out the Webinar Archives

Click here for the archives, get the webinars in podcast form, or visit our YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

GMD Newsletter – April 5, 2022

Curated By Nate Goza @thegozaway
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Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight at 9:00 PM EST

Reigniting our passion: Ten tips to thrive post-pandemic (are we there yet…?)

Presented by Sean Nank

Here we are, still perpetually caught in a purgatory none of us saw coming. Let’s talk about what really happens in classrooms, help each other to re-center our efforts, and explore actionable steps to embrace math, value every student, and advocate for your classroom while staying true to and rediscovering your passion for mathematics in a (hopefully soon) post-pandemic era. We will discuss 10 strategies and mindsets no one has told you – but they should have! Whether it is your 1st or 41st year of teaching, come learn how to embrace your passion for teaching. Topics include knowing your why, thriving with any colleague or administrator, and advocating for students via voice and choice. Leave with actionable steps to help take care of yourself, your colleagues, and your students while using your personal stories to learn how to do and be better together.

Click here to register for this webinar!

Coming Up on 4/19

Powerful Moments in Math Class: Why Certain Experience Stand Out for Students and How to Create More of Them

Presented by Mike Flynn

As teachers, we want our lessons to leave a long-lasting impression on students. When we understand the psychology behind our memories, we can use that knowledge to design powerful moments for our students. According to Heath and Heath (2018) memorable positive experiences contain one or more of the following elements: elevation, insight, pride, and connection. We will learn how to leverage each of these elements in math class to create meaningful and memorable experiences for all students.

#GMDWrites

#GMDReflects Part 4: Resisting Inertia 

This is the fourth and final part of the year-long #GMDReflects series. Before I jump into today’s reflection, here is a brief summary of what we’ve discussed so far.

  • Part 1 (linked here) introduced the practice of Self Study as a tool to help guide our actions as math educators to better reflect our values as human beings.
  • Part 2 (linked here) summarized some details about my personal findings and linked to research on how socioeconomic class affects our behaviour in academic classrooms.
  • Part 3 (linked here) presented the idea of looking outside of ourselves — to artifacts of our work to trusted colleagues — in order to learn things about ourselves that we might not be able to see through introspection and observation.
  • From the beginning I extended the invitation for you all to join in a Self Study project of your own and share your reflection on Twitter with the hashtag #GMDReflects.

My journey in self-study began when I read a research paper on Ontario classrooms (like my own) which found that (1) teachers talk to boys more than girls, (2) teachers discipline Black boys most often, and (3) White, middle-class boys get more positive contact with a teacher than any other group. I wanted to see if the same dynamic existed in my classrooms, and sadly some version of it did. Even as I received positive feedback from girls and from Black, brown, and immigrant students and their families, I was dismayed that boys (often white, often affluent) and students from affluent backgrounds were claiming a disproportionate amount of my time in the classroom.

This realization led me to the most important lesson that I have learned through studying myself: when we join a system, the inertia of the system implicates us all. If inequity is built into a system then we, as agents of that system, will be the agents of inequity. It is not enough to have good intentions, the right values, or even belong to marginalized groups.  Nor is it enough to make cosmetic changes – when inequity is systemic and baked into the culture of an institution, change only happens when we are intentional. We will be agents of inequity unless and until we intentionally and actively push back.

What I have shared in this series is not a guide to systemic change, it is just a tool to begin to see ourselves within a system. How and where are our actions fortifying inequities? How are we perpetuating larger trends that lead to marginalization and pushout? Where can we individually make changes to radically disrupt the power and resource imbalances in our classrooms?

There is lots of learning to be done about how to teach in more just, equitable, and less oppressive ways; ongoing introspection and honest self-evaluation are a critical part of that learning. Books and webinars will not change us unless we want to change, learning about injustice will not change us unless we believe that we need to change.

Above all else, if you have been following the series I hope that you take this message with you: systemic issues live within us and changing a system starts with changing ourselves.

Wishing you strength and fortitude in your journey – Idil (@idil_a_)

Grading Policies that Work for Kids
Last summer our district was challenged to read the book “Grading From the Inside Out” (GFIO) written by Tom Schimmer. It was a comprehensive look at how standards-based grading can “establish a new mindset, followed by new practices that will alter the grading and reporting realities within any classroom.”  Archaic practices are explored with updated and relevant practices explained. My biggest take away from this book is the notion that we should be “using assessment in service of learning rather than exclusively for evaluation.”

As with many districts, our grading policies are very clearly defined so that all stakeholders can understand what is expected:

  • Grades should reflect a student‘s relative mastery of the curriculum and should provide feedback on student progress. Students will be able to receive credit for evidence of increased mastery for major grades 84 and below for a maximum score of an 85.  Students scoring an 85 or above on the original major grade will not have an opportunity to reassess for a higher grade.  
  • Students will have a window of five school days after the grade is returned to re-assess.  (Remediation and reassessment must be completed by the end of the five-day window.)
  • Reassessment may be targeted to areas not mastered on the original assessment.
  • Requirements to reassess, such as attending tutoring sessions and/or completing remedial assignments, will be determined by campus guidelines.
  • Minor/Major Grades that are completed on time, but students didn’t demonstrate mastery:
  • Minor grades can be reassessed/corrected up to a 70%.  
  • For minor grades, students should have at least two or more opportunities to show mastery (up to a 70%).
  • Major grades can be reassessed/corrected up to an 85%.  
  • For major grades, students should have at least one more opportunity after the original assessment to show mastery (up to an 85%).

Does this look familiar? So deeply rooted in policy. I posit: Shouldn’t our grading policies be deeply rooted in student SEL, future ready skills, and a general desire to teach students to love the learning processes?

Changing grading policies is not a task designed to be tackled quickly nor without deep consideration of student needs. I dug into the process a little this year and am excited to share what I have discovered.

The first discovery I made when I moved past the 5 day required time limit and allowed students to set the time for their retesting was that students took more ownership of their learning. Not all students, but a majority. This came with heavy modeling and explanations at the onset. Our team developed a tutorial tile on Canvas (our LMS). On this link were videos, practice websites, worksheets, as well as our classroom resources that students could access at any time to review, rehearse, reconsider. Putting the responsibility back on the student to access the materials, practice, develop their own questions for the teacher, and arrange a tutorial time for follow up led to a more meaningful learning process. Let’s be honest, chasing down students and demanding they learn on MY time just doesn’t work for any of the parties involved and is a vibe kill to a positive learning environment. But when students come prepared with questions and ideas to share developed on their own, the learning process becomes a celebration and takes on a new frame of mind.  In these tutorial and reassessment sessions I had students explain to me how their learning had grown and what their thoughts were about what hadn’t worked the first time around. The metacognition piece has helped my students grow in their learning capacity this year and their trust in themselves.

Allowing students the time to take responsibility for their own learning is a necessary part of SEL as well as many of our core character traits (grit, perseverance, attitude…). My students have adapted to a growth mindset this year thanks to my adapted grading policy of retesting until they show mastery. They know that one test grade does not dictate the end product. They have learned to think through what they understand and what they don’t. They’ve learned to seek out activities on the tutorial site that will further their learning on concepts they don’t have mastered yet. The retest until mastery concept allows students to focus on their specific needs. This is a brilliant concept that I love using in my classroom. It’s taken the pressure off of students to perform on demand. A challenge I have faced is the mindset that we are not preparing students for the real world. I truly get that, but my 6th graders are not at all ready for the real world, nor should they be. These small steps I’m taking are developing their future ready skills and when adult life comes I know they will be prepared to tackle the challenges.

Beth Collins, a science coordinator in my district put it this way: If one student learns to ride a bike and one student takes a couple more weeks to get it down, didn’t they both learn to ride a bike? So why does one student get the mastery score, and the other receives a reduced score only because their learning was delayed? Archaic thinking. But I understand why this mindset exists:

  • Students won’t learn to study and do it right the first time. 
  • We are giving students a free pass to be mediocre.
  • I have to create so many different assessments.
  • How do I keep track of who mastered what and when?

There’s lot of barriers that prevent teachers from jumping in with both feet to this concept. The archaic grading policies are still posted, and it’s been a challenge to change minds on my team. I hope to be a leader for change in my district to see the principles in GFIO become our norm. I encourage you to check out “Grading From the Inside Out” and see how it can guide you to making your grading practices more meaningful for students, yourself, and all stakeholders. I love teaching students to love the learning process and I’d love to share more if you’re interested in learning together. You can find me on Twitter.

Written by Casey Gordon (@mscaseygordon)

We Want Your Voices!

We’d love to share this space with teachers and their students who feel compelled to share with our community!

Please reach out on Twitter or send an email to globalmathdepartment@gmail.com if you’d like to get involved or contribute an article (or articles).

Check Out the Webinar Archives

Click here for the archives, get the webinars in podcast form, or visit our YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

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GMD Newsletter – March 8, 2022

Curated By Nate Goza @thegozaway
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If You Let Your Students Surprise You, They Will

Presented by Eli Luberoff

For many students, math class embodies the opposite of surprise: getting the right answer and using the right way to get to that answer. But the most joyful learning-and teaching!-happens when we relish ambiguity, invite the unexpected, and let students surprise us with their varied brilliance.

Click here to register for this webinar!

Coming Up on 3/22

Halt 8 Thinking Thieves

Presented by Traci Jackson

How do we unintentionally limit student thinking? What should we do instead? Come engage in an interactive session on how to combat 8 thinking thieves and learn how the 8 effective teaching practices champion student thinking!

#GMDWrites

To say it’s been a tough year for educators is a gross understatement. Here at the Newsletter, we’ve done our best to keep the content coming, but it hasn’t been easy. Which was why it was especially nice to receive this letter from Neil Hamilton, a maths teacher in Australia earlier this month:

My thanks to the Global Math Department

Maths has always held a fascination for me, the way that ideas can be connected through the use of symbols has a kind of beauty and simplicity that has always appealed.
Out of interest I spend time searching and reading to develop my understanding and try to work out why I want to teach maths in the way I do.  I always felt like an outsider.  Much of the maths content I find comes from overseas.  I have often been inspired by reading the work of mathematicians and wished that I had the resources to travel and hear them present in person.

When my world slowed down through COVID, I happened to find the Global Maths Department’s professional development sessions.  They gave me the chance to interact with a wider range of educators and to hear and think about Maths in a much wider context.  I began to realise that their focus on personal relationships as a part of Maths education was I was subconsciously looking for.  Other educators also started to provide webinars and record the sessions in response to the inability to travel or meet during COVID.  Suddenly Australia didn’t seem so far away from everyone else.

My own experiences with COVID restrictions at school in Australia started me questioning my beliefs about education and where my priorities were.  It was at this time that I read one of Hema Khodai’s contributions to the newsletter.  Her words were the inspiration I needed.  They made concrete the abstract thoughts and feelings floating around in my head.

They were the beginning of a new routine for me. I look forward to reading the newsletter each Wednesday morning, usually while I am sitting at the beach waiting for it to be light enough to swim in the ocean.  It is a highlight of my week.  I read, thinking about maths in a way I haven’t before and let those thoughts work through my brain while I swim.  By the time I get to school I am often changing my daily program to incorporate these.  I tell my students we talk and do maths together, rather than me teach it.  The things I will talk about are affected by the things I read.

As the world and schools start to open up again, we are getting busier and busier, and we spend more time trying to catch up rather than think ahead or reflect I feel it is my turn to write and contribute and give my thanks to those that have inspired me.  Through my interactions with the Global Math Department, I have more self-belief in the way that I teach Maths.  I have come to realise this is what is important to me.

We Want Your Voices!

We’d love to share this space with teachers and their students who feel compelled to share with our community!

Please reach out on Twitter or send an email to globalmathdepartment@gmail.com if you’d like to get involved or contribute an article (or articles).

Check Out the Webinar Archives

Click here for the archives, get the webinars in podcast form, or visit our YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

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GMD Newsletter – February 22, 2022

Curated By Nate Goza @thegozaway
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Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight at 9:00 PM EST

Developing Mathematical Literacy through Equitable Teaching Practices

Presented by Farshid Safi

How do we develop mathematical literacy with our students through equitable teaching practices in order to make sense of an ever changing world? In this interactive session, we will explore intentional ways to effectively engage K-12 and post-secondary students in collaborative practices that leverage their identity, brilliance, and lived experiences. Together we will highlight specific ways in which mathematical reasoning plays a pivotal role in making well-founded decisions to bring about a more just society.

Click here to register for this webinar!

Coming Up on 3/8

If You Let Your Students Surprise You, They Will

Presented by Eli Luberoff

For many students, math class embodies the opposite of surprise: getting the right answer and using the right way to get to that answer. But the most joyful learning-and teaching!-happens when we relish ambiguity, invite the unexpected, and let students surprise us with their varied brilliance.

Click here to register in advance for this webinar!

Want to get involved with our Newsletter?

We’d love to hear your voice! Reach out on Twitter or send an email to globalmathdepartment@gmail.com.

Check Out the Webinar Archives

Click here for the archives, get the webinars in podcast form, or visit our YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Twitter
Visit our Website Visit our Website
Copyright © 2022 Global Math Department, All rights reserved.
“Thanks for opting in to receive the weekly newsletter from the Global Math Department.”

GMD Newsletter – February 8, 2022

Curated By Nate Goza @thegozaway
View this email in your browser
Tweet
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Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight at 9:00 PM EST

Flexibility Through Facts

Presented by Ann Elise Record

Fluency has three aspects: flexibility, efficiency, and accuracy. Let’s explore the heart of the strategic thinking for all 4 operations and discuss how we can begin that conceptual understanding while developing students’ fact fluency. Not only will students develop fluency for their basic facts, but they will be setting a foundation of flexibility that will naturally progress to their grade level content. Together we can create positive math journeys for ALL our students!

Click here to register for this webinar!

Coming Up on 2/22

Developing Mathematical Literacy through Equitable Teaching Practices

Presented by Farshid Safi

How do we develop mathematical literacy with our students through equitable teaching practices in order to make sense of an ever changing world? In this interactive session, we will explore intentional ways to effectively engage K-12 and post-secondary students in collaborative practices that leverage their identity, brilliance, and lived experiences. Together we will highlight specific ways in which mathematical reasoning plays a pivotal role in making well-founded decisions to bring about a more just society.

Click here to register in advance for this webinar!

#GMDWrites

#GMDReflects Part 3: Looking Outside of Ourselves
This is Part 3 of the year-long #GMDReflects series. In part 1 (linked here) I introduced the practice of Self Study as a tool to help guide our actions as math educators to better reflect our values as human beings, and in Part 2 (linked here) I shared some details about my findings. I also extended the invitation to join in a Self Study project of your own. In each part of this series I will be sharing prompts to guide your self-study, they will also be shared on Twitter with the hashtag #GMDReflects.

In the introduction of this series I outlined 5 features that any effective self-study should include:

  1. have a clear focus: address 1 specific practice/dynamic
  2. be systematic: observe, reflect, change, reflect, repeat
  3. be honest: you will learn difficult things about yourself, that is precisely the point
  4. include feedback from others and artifacts 
  5. result in professional and personal change
The first three features have been covered in Parts 1 and 2, in this part we will think about artifacts and feedback.

Artifacts

If you, like me, are examining teacher-student communication, take a close and dispassionate look at whatever written communication you have on hand. Review all of your report card comments with a researcher’s eye; see how many and what kinds of emails you’ve sent to parents and administrators about students; assess the tone and details of emails sent directly to students; take another look at the written feedback on your most recent batch of assignments before returning them. What trends and patterns do you see?

We leave a lot of evidence about our (conscious or unconscious) thoughts, beliefs, and values in the artifacts of our work. While we may not be conscious of the different ways in which we communicate to and about students, they are. Students compare assignment feedback, report card comments, and even our email responses or response time with their peers. This kind of audit is a worthwhile activity and, in my experience, it is easier to develop more equitable systems for written communication than it is for other kinds of behaviour.

Include Feedback From Others

Despite the name, collaboration is a critical part of self-study. Once you have determined your focus and spent some time observing your own practice, find a trusted colleague to act as a thought partner in your journey. An outside view can help us gain deeper insight or a new perspective on our work.

Depending on your needs, your thought partner might provide:

  • space for you to process difficult realizations or emotions as they arise;
  • honest feedback on your practice based on their observations;
  • insights or potential actions related to the focus of your self-study.

Some years ago, a friend and colleague asked me about my experience with a student who we will call Maya. I taught Maya the year prior and shared my experience of her as hard working and funny, but not particularly excited about math. My colleague told me that she was having trouble connecting with Maya. Even though she was struggling with the course content, Maya was not receptive to my colleague’s attempts to support her and their relationship was becoming challenging. We have these conversations often as educators — searching for insights into challenging students — but our conversation went deeper. My colleague had come to me after a reflection activity that revealed a concerning pattern. She went through her class rosters to make notes on each student’s progress and found that she was consistently struggling to connect with Black girls (like Maya). After we discussed Maya, she shared this revelation with me. I didn’t have answers for her, but I gave my colleague a non-judgmental space to think aloud, express her feelings, and begin to think of next steps. The conversation has stayed with me for years. I was taken aback by my colleague’s honesty and vulnerability, but I was especially impressed with her resolve to grow. She did not come to me to verify that Maya was, in fact, a difficult child, or in search of some kind of absolution from a Black woman for her challenges with Black girls, she came for information and received it with an open mind.

So I leave you with that advice: as you deepen your reflection and self-study, keep an open mind to the information as it presents itself.

I look forward to connecting with you at #GMDReflects. – Idil Abdulkadir (@idil_a_)

Wanna Quit Teaching? You’re Not Alone. Three Ways to Reclaim and Rekindle Our Professional Flourishment

You don’t need me to tell you how demanding and outright exhausting it is to be a classroom teacher. And given the realities of our professional landscape these days, many of us are more than just exhausted. Every passing day, I hear more stories of teachers who feel defeated, demoralized, and ready to be finished.

What is flourishment and why is it essential to our work?

Think of your best moments as a teacher—moments when you saw all of your students curious and thriving, developing positive identities, and actively engaging in thinking, reasoning, and debating with each other. Professionally speaking, nothing nourishes us quite like those moments, right? We feel validated, enthusiastic, and filled with a desire to flourish. I call that  feeling “flourishment.” It is our most precious resource as imperfect teachers because it’s what keeps us going day to day and year to year and gives us the courage and resolve to remain unfinished and continually striving for betterI think we are all craving—needing—more flourishment, perhaps now more than ever.

Full disclosure, my background is in mathematics education and I primarily work with math educators, so I view and translate my thinking through the lens of math teaching. That said, anything you read here is generalizable. I’m so concerned about our collective sense of efficacy as teacher—especially math teachers—that I wrote a book about it. The Imperfect and Unfinished Math Teacher: A Journey to Reclaim Our Professional Growth outlines a journey we—K-12 classroom math teachers and those who directly support our work—can take together to reclaim control over our professional growth and rekindle our sense of professional flourishment.

Here are three “beacons” that can serve as guiding principles for us on our journey to becoming more fulfilled and nourished teachers. For each of these beacons, I invite you to take a specific action that can nourish your teaching passion and help you discover ways that you can flourish at your craft.

Beacon #1: Flourishment requires a lot of grace because it requires us to break down the silos that divide us.

I want to tell you something: math class doesn’t work for all of my students. Even during those stretches when my flourishment is elevated, I know that some of my students aren’t having enough positive experiences in my classroom. And despite my best efforts, I know that there are always a few students who think less about themselves mathematically when they leave my classroom at the end of every school year. My failures trouble me deeply.

If you’re feeling insecure about your teaching expertise, you are not alone. Each and every one of us feels troubled, perhaps even a twinge of shame, by the outcomes we are experiencing in our classrooms. And if you’re thinking about quitting because you don’t feel like a very good math teacher, I want you to know that you belong, you are capable, you are not alone, and I am honored that you are my colleague.
I tell you this because being an imperfect and unfinished math teacher requires a lot of grace, and it’s something that we must learn to give to each other. The siloing effect of school structures and our teaching schedules normalize the professional act of teaching as a private practice conducted alone behind closed classroom doors. As a result, we often find ourselves without the necessary relationships we need to talk authentically about our teaching struggles and to collaborate together as active partners who support each other’s professional learning.

Action to help us break down the silos that divide us:

Find a teaching “buddy” or two or three. Meet a few times a month after school and talk about the passions that drive you as a teacher. Try to choose moments when you know that you can relax and not have to worry about what’s next.
Here are some questions to help you get started with having authentic conversations.

  • What is your teaching story? Tell each other about your career path and how you came to the position you are in.
  • What is your math story? Tell each other about your experiences in math class as a student. How might your personal relationship with mathematics impact your teaching, for better or worse?
  • What does your ideal math classroom look, sound, and feel like? What “human data” are you striving to achieve with your students? What data are you seeing in your classroom that troubles you the most?
  • What do you want your legacy to be as a teacher? How do you want to be remembered by your students? By your colleagues?

Beacon #2: Flourishment is something we must bring about for ourselves and each other as capable producers of our own professional knowledge.

We work in a system of math education that is designed to serve its own needs, not ours. The current structure of math education is designed to standardize the teaching and learning of mathematics, establish tools of accountability and assessment, enforce compliance to mandates by attaching funding to performance, and to implement these tasks as efficiently as possible in a one-size-fits-all bureaucratic approach. This top-down philosophy extends to professional development where we are positioned as passive consumers of our professional knowledge rather than capable producers of it. And despite decades of research that tells the professional development is underperforming, it has remained relatively unchanged. And it’s time that we do something about it.

Our need for a robust sense of professional flourishment is  uniquely individual. It  requires a teacher-centered, teacher-directed approach to improving the teaching and learning of mathematics in the classroom. We must take more ownership over our own professional development and position ourselves as capable partners in each other’s professional growth.

Action to help us direct our own professional learning:

Spend time in each other’s classrooms. Even 20 minutes every other week can be enough to help you shift some thinking. The purpose of these observations is not to evaluate your colleagues. You are there to watch math class from the student perspective and to think about your own math class and your own instructional craft. Even your presence in the classroom has a powerful impact on the students in the room. From their perspective, they learn to see us as life-long learners who are continually striving to improve.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself while you watch:

  • What are students seeing from their perspective?
  • What is being valued most in the classroom? Are students valued for giving the right answers? Or are they valued for their thinking and reasoning behind the answers they give?
  • How is authority shared in the classroom? Are students expecting the teacher to be the answer key or do they turn to each other to see if their answers agree?
  • How is student voice elevated in the room? How are they valued for what they already know from their lived experiences?

After observing, think about your own actions as a teacher in your own classroom. What might you do differently? How can you make math class work for more of your students?

Beacon #3: We find flourishment when we align our practice with our purpose.

In our current culture, we’re incentivized to value test scores as the measure of our success. The constant (and ever increasing) focus on assessment data continually threatens our sense of flourishment. Most of us didn’t become teachers because we wanted to treat our students like they’re test scores that need to be raised. Our teaching hearts are nourished by more noble calls to action such as social justice, equity and fairness, and the emotional well-being and intellectual development of the young people we teach. We want our students to feel capable, to be curious, and to have a math story that is unfinished. And we want to be remembered as loving mentors who challenged them and believed in them.

Action to help you align your purpose with your practice:

Imagine it’s the end of the school year, and you are interviewing your students about their math identity. What do you want your students to say about themselves? What beliefs do you want them to have about their math abilities? How do you want them to feel about themselves in math class next year? How do you want to be remembered by them in the years to come?

Your answers say a lot about your passions as an educator and what motivates you to flourish. With this in mind, collect data from your students that can help you improve in ways that matter to you. Too often, the only evaluative feedback in math class goes from us “down” to them. Find ways to elicit feedback from your students. These can be weekly surveys or “report cards” where students reflect and write about their experiences or they can be done orally as a group.

There are no quick fixes to the formidable obstacles we face. These three beacons may not be  a magical salve for all that ails your teaching spirit, but I hope they help shift some thinking about what you need to be nourished as a teacher. I hope these actions help you find ways that you can grow your craft as a capable teacher passionate about the well-being of the students in your care.

Written by Chase Orton (@mathgeek76)

Want to get involved with our Newsletter?

We’d love to hear your voice! Reach out on Twitter or send an email to globalmathdepartment@gmail.com.

Check Out the Webinar Archives

Click here for the archives, get the webinars in podcast form, or visit our YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Twitter
Visit our Website Visit our Website
Copyright © 2022 Global Math Department, All rights reserved.
“Thanks for opting in to receive the weekly newsletter from the Global Math Department.”

GMD Newsletter – January 25, 2022

Curated By Nate Goza @thegozaway
View this email in your browser
Tweet
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Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight at 9:00 PM EST

Improving College Readiness through Mathematical Modeling

Presented by Denise Green and Alison Lynch

What does it mean to be college-ready? How do we prepare more students to succeed in college-level math? In this session, we will share how integrating mathematical modeling into K-12 and post-secondary classrooms can change classroom practices and position more students for success. You will learn about our cross-institution collaboration and engage in example modeling tasks.

Click here to register for this webinar!

Coming Up on 2/8

Flexibility Through Facts

Presented by Ann Elise Record

Fluency has three aspects: flexibility, efficiency, and accuracy. Let’s explore the heart of the strategic thinking for all 4 operations and discuss how we can begin that conceptual understanding while developing students’ fact fluency. Not only will students develop fluency for their basic facts, but they will be setting a foundation of flexibility that will naturally progress to their grade level content. Together we can create positive math journeys for ALL our students!

Click here to register in advance for this webinar!

Want to get involved with our Newsletter?

We’d love to hear your voice! Reach out on Twitter or send an email to globalmathdepartment@gmail.com.

Check Out the Webinar Archives

Click here for the archives, get the webinars in podcast form, or visit our YouTube Channel to find videos of past sessions and related content.

Follow us on Twitter Follow us on Twitter
Visit our Website Visit our Website
Copyright © 2022 Global Math Department, All rights reserved.