Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight!

Attending to Equity in Mathematics During a Pandemic:
Supporting Inclusion, Access, Fairness and Respect for All

Presented by Ruthmae Sears, Caree Pinder

This presentation will describe means to attend to equity in the era of a pandemic. We will describe factors that can impact equitable learning outcomes, and identify strategies that can address equity when teaching remotely.

To join us at 9:00 PM EST for this webinar click here!

Next Week 

Revolution is Needed in High School Geometry

Presented by Dr. Jenny Tsankova

Dr. Jenny Tsankova will present an argument in favor of changing the way we communicate to students the following essential ideas: 1) the idea of proof, 2) the language of Geometry, and 3) the traditional topics we teach, such as constructing the perpendicular bisector. The goal is for the mathematical ideas to be accessible to all students, connected to other mathematical ideas, and embedded in relevant context without sacrificing the cognitive demand.

Register ahead of time by clicking here!

You can always check out past and upcoming Global Math Department webinars. Click here for the archives or get the webinars in podcast form!

From the World of Math Ed

From In-Person Education to Disaster Distancing Learning and Back Again
 

Joni Mitchell and The Counting Crows once sang:
 
“Don’t it always seem to go \
That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone \
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot”
 
That’s what I think about when I reflect on how in-person education has melted away and become disaster distance learning. 
 
For sure, education has never been “paradise”, especially for marginalized and oppressed students, families, communities, teachers, and staff. But the pandemic brings into sharp relief just how much school does for us as an institution, and just how little the United States does for it:

Source
 

Next year, I”ll be teaching mathematics teaching methods courses to pre-service teachers who, from today’s vantage point, will be entering an uncertain future. And I’m racking my brain on how things will work and look like. 
 
The CDC just released some guidance, which include requiring staff to wear masks, encouraging increased ventilation with outside air, turning student desks in the same direction and spacing them six feet apart (I kid you not), and cancelling extracurricular activities. 
 
The Learning Policy Institute has a summary of what five other countries are actually doing as they reopen schools:

But I’m not a classroom teacher right now, and I doubt many of the people designing school reopening policies are either. As Annie Tan (@AnnieTangent) and Dr. Kristopher J. Childs (@DrKChilds) point out:

Jennifer Gonzalez (@cultofpedagogy) also states in her article Reopening School: What it Might Look Like:
 
“All of these ideas completely suck compared to pre-pandemic life. They are depressing and repressive and in a lot of schools, not even realistic.”

But let’s come back to Joni Mitchell and the Counting Crows for a minute (a sentence I never imagined I would write). School is not a paradise, and as David E. Kirkland (@davidekirkland) explains in the Guidance on Culturally Responsive-Sustaining School Reopenings authored by the Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools (NYU Metro Center):
 
“We don’t want to “go back” to normal; we want things to improve…A joy-based reimagining of schooling is one where we replicate spaces that center students of the global majority (BIPOC) and let go of anything that continues to marginalize, exclude, and harm them.”
 
The NYU Metro Center offers up suggestions for reimagining schooling. A few that stood out to me include:

• Gatherings that occur in circles for all school community members
• Embracing curricula driven by students and that elevates community histories
• Eliminating homework
• Removing metal detectors
• Eliminating suspensions for non-violent offenses

Yes, COVID-19 has completely paved over in-person education this semester. But it wasn’t and never has been the beautiful, lush garden that reporters, policymakers, and politicians sometimes like to make it out to be.
 
When schools eventually reopen, we must continue to seek new possibilities for education that (1) center the voices of marginalized students and communities, including BIPOC and students with disabilities, (2) promote rehumanizing curricula such as Seattle’s K-12 Math Ethnic Studies Framework, (3) reduce or eliminate standardized testing, which creates racialized and gendered hierarchies under the guise of a neoliberal myth of meritocracy, and (4) prioritize joy and love above concerns such as accountability and grit.

@melvinmperalta

How Are Teachers Making Sense of Teaching During COVID-19?
 

Over the last few weeks, our research team has had the opportunity to speak with several secondary mathematics teachers about their experiences moving from in-person teaching to remote teaching. One thing that has become apparent during these conversations is that a lot of teachers are wrestling with the same questions as they continue to navigate the new jobs they find themselves in. Here are some of those questions and the things teachers have said as they think about them:
 
Is there a way to support students’ mathematical exploration through an online learning platform? 

Teachers that are accustomed to teaching conceptually don’t have access to manipulatives or don’t have the time or the resources to find or create videos that engage in conceptual ideas vs. procedural ideas. Live video platforms like Zoom aren’t set up to support the types of rich, inquiry-based discussions that many math teachers planned for their classroom lessons. Furthermore, students don’t show up to class or don’t turn in assignments for a variety of reasonable and understandable reasons.

One way for teachers or school leaders to support mathematical exploration is to strategically choose topics for learning that lend themselves well to online tools of engagement, such as statistics, probability, or geometry (if possible). Other teachers have found some success combining different online resources, like having students work through a Desmos activity during a live Zoom class, to curate opportunities for engagement that move beyond procedural lectures even with kids’ videos turned off.
 

Can teachers feel confident claiming what their students know or don’t know? 

Checking for and building on student understanding can be difficult even in the classroom setting. Without the ability to elicit student thinking during remote learning, teachers are forced to provide feedback to students’ finished products and not throughout their process of understanding. Teachers often rely on visual cues like students’ facial expressions for signs of confusion or understanding, a source of information that is no longer available to them now that teaching has moved online. 

Creating a culture of open communication can help students not only feel safe reaching out to teachers when they don’t understand something, it can also support them in explaining the mathematical details of their misunderstanding. Efficiently using feedback features of online resources such as Google Forms, Google Classroom, Desmos, EDpuzzle, etc. can also help cut down on the time of providing students individual feedback. 
 

How do teachers build and maintain relationships with students if they can’t see them in person?

One thing that is clear is that teachers are constantly trying to balance their role as a math teacher with the reality that their students are people living through a pandemic and may not be able to be students right now. Not only that, but students now have the option to just not show up to class or turn in work with very little, if any, consequences. Teachers are faced with the daunting task of creating an online environment that a middle- or high-school kid wants to come to instead of sleeping in.  Over time, the impersonal nature of online teaching has taken its toll on teachers who enter the profession because of their love of connecting with people and students.

Teachers have begun to use their platforms for learning to support students’ mental and emotional well-being, such as using their schools’ messaging platform to notify students of free meal offerings, or using Desmos to ask how students are feeling. Adjusting conceptions of “good teaching” to include more opportunities to make students laugh and focus less on teaching mathematical formulas is a necessary adaptation in this unique context. We all know that math will always be there and there will always be gaps in students’ understanding, so when faced with the choice of teaching math or teaching kindness, teachers choose kindness time and time again.

 
Do these questions resonate with you? What are some of the things you have thought about or conversations you have had about these ideas? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Written by Katherine Schneeberger McGugan (@kath_schnee)
with support from Ilana Horn (@ilana_horn) and Jessica Moses (@Jess_Moses1)

Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight!

Deliberate Practice: How Math Teachers Can Close the Professional Development Gap

Presented by Chase Orton

I have a confession—math class isn’t working for some of my students. Despite my best efforts, I continue to struggle to meet the myriad of social, emotional, and academic needs of all my students while also moving learning forward for the whole class. Maybe you or someone you work with is also facing this same challenge. Maybe math class isn’t working for some of your students too. If so, please know it’s not your fault. Math teaching is a difficult and complex task, and I know we all want to get better at it. But to get better, we need to close the gap between the PD we’re offered and the PD we need. In this webinar, I will share my thoughts on what’s wrong about our current approaches to PD while also offering you a pathway for a more coherent, teacher-centered approach to your professional learning as a math teacher. While teachers of mathematics are the intended audience, this webinar has value for any educator vested in improving the quality of teaching in the math classroom.

To join us at 9:00 PM EST for this webinar click here!

Next Week 

Attending to Equity in Mathematics During a Pandemic: Supporting Inclusion, Access, Fairness and Respect for All

Presented by: Ruthmae Sears and Caree Pinder

This presentation will describe means to attend to equity in the era of a pandemic. We will describe factors that can impact equitable learning outcomes, and identify strategies that can address equity when teaching remotely.

Register for the webinar here, and join us next week!

You can always check out past and upcoming Global Math Department webinars. Click here for the archives or get the webinars in podcast form!

From the World of Math Ed

Laughable Graphs

This week, the state of Georgia shared the following graph as evidence for why it reopened the state for “normal business operations”. 



What do you notice? What do you wonder? What’s the story this graph is supposed to tell?

What you might notice is that the dates along the x-axis come in no particular order. You may wonder if the story being this graph is to lead viewers to believing the state has had a significant decrease in the number of COVID-19 cases over time. The governor has since issued an apology addressing the misinformation the graph represents. Can you believe it? A mathematical misrepresentation generated an apology! This is big news. 



When I first viewed this graph on Twitter, I could not help but laugh at the captions. Not a maniacal laugh. Not a “haha that’s so funny” graph. No…this kind: 

The kind that recognizes that these graphs are used to make real decisions that impact real people. 

Bob Lochel (@bobloch) shared the balanced sentiment of the joy of having new content to talk through with students and the sunken pit of the stomach feeling that the new content even exists.  Same, Bob. Same. 

So I culled together several laughable graphs (jokes on you, it’s not that funny) that have been used in real situations. For each one, I suggest asking yourself the same three questions as before: 



What do you notice? What do you wonder? What’s the story this graph is supposed to tell?



I’d also invite you to ask yourself one more question: What’s the real story? 



With all the (mis)information being passed around right now, it is important to find sources for data that describe the real story, what is actually happening, rather than the fictional world we wish we had. 

 

Oh. Wait. That last one is just the story of my own life right now, and I’m sure the same for some of you as well. Solidarity, friends. 

Remotely Yours, 



Lauren Baucom

@LBMathemagician

Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight!

Making (Math) Thinking Visible: Embracing Edtech to Help Students Demonstrate Understandings

Presented by Stacey Roshan

This session will examine specific examples using Pear Deck, Flipgrid, and Sutori. Participants will learn how to create student-paced Pear Deck activities with embedded Flipgrid prompts to create exercises that allow students to reflect on how they are understanding the new information they are receiving. At the conclusion of the Pear Deck activity, teachers can use Pear Deck Takeaways to have students revise errors and talk about how their understanding of the topic has improved to help them arrive at a new solution to the problem. Having students evaluate how they approached problems done in the past is an important component of the learning process. By actively reflecting on what they learned and how they learned it, students are able to grow their understandings beyond rote memorization. And in the reflection process, students become aware of holes in their knowledge. This awareness is a powerful component in helping students learn how to learn.

Sutori is another edtech tool that will be showcased in this session. Participants will be walked through an activity asking students to look back on past work and document how it relates to their new knowledge. Reflection is key to learning, and this project provides students the opportunity to tap into prior knowledge and form a deeper understanding of connections between the chapters being studied. As with the Pear Deck activity, Flipgrid is infused into this activity to allow students the opportunity to talk out their thought process directly to their webcam.

To join us at 9:00 PM EST for this webinar click here!

Next Week!

Deliberate Practice:
How Math Teachers Can Close the Professional Development Gap

Presented by Chase Orton

I have a confession—math class isn’t working for some of my students. Despite my best efforts, I continue to struggle to meet the myriad of social, emotional, and academic needs of all my students while also moving learning forward for the whole class. Maybe you or someone you work with is also facing this same challenge. Maybe math class isn’t working for some of your students too. If so, please know it’s not your fault. Math teaching is a difficult and complex task, and I know we all want to get better at it. But to get better, we need to close the gap between the PD we’re offered and the PD we need. In this webinar, I will share my thoughts on what’s wrong about our current approaches to PD while also offering you a pathway for a more coherent, teacher-centered approach to your professional learning as a math teacher. While teachers of mathematics are the intended audience, this webinar has value for any educator vested in improving the quality of teaching in the math classroom.
 

Register ahead of time by clicking here!

You can always check out past and upcoming Global Math Department webinars. Click here for the archives or get the webinars in podcast form!

From the World of Math Ed

“Disaster Distance Learning”: 5 Items After 2 Months

[The term “disaster distance learning” is from a blog post by @TheJLV.]

Before getting into this week’s updates, one GMD note from me: The Global Math Department has allowed me to manage their twitter account. I’ve been trying to use it more actively, and will appreciate any and all feedback from anyone willing to give it! What would you like to see more or less of as the school year comes to an end and over the summer vacation (as applicable)? There is some really great content in our newsletters and webinars, and I am hoping GMD can be a source of information that helps rather than overloads. 🙏

This contribution contains 5 items; please read in accordance with your bandwidth. I’m listing the 5 items before their respective tweets.

1) Virtual Advisory: Zoom-based morning Advisory/Homeroom from Sam J Shah;
2) Where are the educators?: Chalkbeat on NY Governor Cuomo ‘Reimagine Education’ Council;
3) Blaming Teachers?: Brian Robinson unpacks a thread from Nikole Hannah-Jones;
4) Preprint: Cathery Yeh and Laurie Rubel (2020) “Queering Mathematics: Disrupting Binary Oppositions in Mathematics Pre-service Teacher Education”;
5) #31DaysIBPOC: I strongly recommend a piece by fellow GMD contributor Hema Khodai.

Tweet and Blog Post:

Tweet and Link:

Quote-Retweet Commentary and Original Tweet (a bit of a rabbit hole):

Tweet and Preprint (quick read if you have it in you!):

Tweet and #31DaysIBPOC Contribution:

A closing word from Audre Lorde: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

I know that we will Move Beyond (whatever that means) the present conditions; but, we need caring educators to preserve themselves. Please do not neglect self-care!

Benjamin Dickman [@benjamindickman]

Online Professional Development Sessions

Tonight!

Rich Math Tasks & 5 Practices in Online Teaching

Presented by Theresa Wills

Explore strategies to implement rich mathematical tasks and discussions in your synchronous online classroom. In this webinar, you will engage in interactive slides to complete a task. You will incorporate multiple representations such as using concrete, pictorial, and abstract. Then, all participants will engage in a math talk that utilizes the 5 practices. Register to see how to transition your pedagogical practices into the online environment and keep your math class fun, interactive, collaborative, and rigorous.

To join us at 9:00 PM EST for this webinar click here!

Next Week 

Making (Math) Thinking Visible: Embracing Edtech to Help Students Demonstrate Understandings

Presented by Stacey Roshan

This session will examine specific examples using Pear Deck, Flipgrid, and Sutori. Participants will learn how to create student-paced Pear Deck activities with embedded Flipgrid prompts to create exercises that allow students to reflect on how they are understanding the new information they are receiving. At the conclusion of the Pear Deck activity, teachers can use Pear Deck Takeaways to have students revise errors and talk about how their understanding of the topic has improved to help them arrive at a new solution to the problem. Having students evaluate how they approached problems done in the past is an important component of the learning process. By actively reflecting on what they learned and how they learned it, students are able to grow their understandings beyond rote memorization. And in the reflection process, students become aware of holes in their knowledge. This awareness is a powerful component in helping students learn how to learn.

Sutori is another edtech tool that will be showcased in this session. Participants will be walked through an activity asking students to look back on past work and document how it relates to their new knowledge. Reflection is key to learning, and this project provides students the opportunity to tap into prior knowledge and form a deeper understanding of connections between the chapters being studied. As with the Pear Deck activity, Flipgrid is infused into this activity to allow students the opportunity to talk out their thought process directly to their webcam.

Register ahead of time by clicking here!

You can always check out past and upcoming Global Math Department webinars. Click here for the archives or get the webinars in podcast form!

From the World of Math Ed

Shared with permission from Bean, this is a different kind of article written for the GMD Newsletter…
 

I love grappling with everything related to mathematics education. I dream about it in all of its puzzling, perplexing, and messy glory and shortcomings. It preoccupies my every weekday-thought; who am I kidding, it also seeps into all of my weekend thoughts. 
 
So it breaks my heart every time Bean and I sit down to do math homework and my little one cries out with frustration. This little kid, who for years has been my eager partner in #tmwyk, now dissolves into tears every time we log in to Google Classroom. I’m serious. She’s a puddle on the floor at my feet. My arms cannot begin to gather the viscous pool of disengagement and defiance spreading across the carpet at my feet. (@MathStudio_Usha says she is “her Mother’s Daughter”.) I can’t help but feel like an abysmal failure both as an educator and a mother that the love I have for learning and the joy I experience when mucking about with mathematics isn’t shared by my only child. 
 
We sit in seething resentment, my mind spinning with all the strategies that I would normally try and wondering if I should in turn threaten, cajole, punish, surrender, my mini me into getting the worksheets done so I can feel better about it. 
 
“Mama, I want to show you the Coronavirus tracker.”
 
I’m still angry and don’t give a sh_t about the tracker of this stupid disease that’s ruining my life. (See how in the midst of a global pandemic, we continue to center ourselves?)
 
She goes on to show me anyways; comparing the total confirmed cases in Canada to the total confirmed cases globally. (By the end of Grade 4, she only needs to be able to read, represent, compare, and order whole numbers to 10000.)

She reads, describes, and interprets the secondary data presented in this image, pausing to pose purposeful questions to ensure I understand the magnitude of the information she’s sharing.

She effortlessly toggles back and forth between the chart view and the table view in the section below, carefully reviewing the labels on the axes while drawing conclusions from the comparisons between provinces.

It took me longer than I care to admit to really hear the depth of understanding my daughter has developed for herself; the complex data she has unpacked and was now offering to me as an olive branch. A glimpse into the learning she was choosing to engage in and generously inviting me to enter.
 
I have no profound words of wisdom, no wonder-filled revelation about humanity. This is simply a story that I wanted to share. An experience that gave me some comfort. A reminder that we don’t need to force learning because children (and grown-ups) will learn about things that interest them when they are ready.

@HKhodai

Wealth, Shown to Scale

Megan Bang (@meganbang3), an education professor who has written incredible articles on indigenous STEM practices (among other work), shared this website of wealth inequality, shown to scale. The authorship is not clearly indicated, but the website is hosted through Matt Korostoff’s github account, so he may be its creator. Scroll through everything. It takes time. But then again, that may be the point.

mathartchallenge

This has been covered already in the GMD, but it’s worth plugging yet another reminder that #mathartchallenge continues, thanks to the incredible work of Annie Perkins (@anniek_p) and everyone else who has been creating math art from their homes and other spaces.

Math Summer 2020

Howie Hua (@howie_hua) is organizing two hour-long sessions of low-floor, high-ceiling problems every Wednesday from 10am to 12pm (PDT) from June through August. If you would like to host a problem, please sign up in the google doc.

On a separate note, Howie has been killing it in the math twitter humor department recently. You can find a repository of some past tweets that have been well-received. For some, a little bit of humor can go a long way to help through these rough times.

@melvinmperalta