2024 Year In Review

Teachers leading PD in the San Luis Valley

Where did the year go? In order to get at least one post up on this blog before the calendar flips to 2025, let me recap some big events of the last year.

January 2024: Math Routines in the San Luis Valley

The first highlight of the past year happened in Alamosa in January, and it was the result of many months of work. In Summer of 2023, my CDE colleagues and I recruited a dozen teachers from Colorado's San Luis Valley to attend conferences in Denver for four days and then turn what they learned into local professional development for districts in the San Luis Valley in January. I'm skipping over a lot of details, but it was great to work with these teachers and support them in their sessions.

February 2024: Launch Years Convening in Anaheim

It was a great year working with Colorado's Math Pathways Task Force and receiving support through the Launch Years Initiative. A contingent from Colorado joined up with more than 20 other states in a very rainy Anaheim, California to share progress and strategies about how to improve high school math and transitions for students as they matriculate to college and other postsecondary opportunities.

 

It rains in California, sometimes

July 2024: Math Intervention Design Workshop

In July, CDE teamed up with CCTM to host a design workshop in Summit County for a week. As I told the attendees, it probably felt like (a) work that felt like a vacation, or (b) a vacation that required a lot of work. Either way, Summit County in the summer is a delightful place to be. About 20 educators of all kinds -- higher ed, K-12, veterans, novices -- worked to develop materials that should be useful with students who are still struggling after regular instruction. We were all really pleased with the effort that went into these materials and we're looking forward to getting them into people's hands and getting feedback about how well they work.

The design workshop participants got to test their creations with summer school kids in Leadville, who graciously hosted us for a morning

September 2024: ASSM, NCSM, and NCTM in Chicago

This year's ASSM, NCSM, and NCTM conferences were in Chicago. To take in all three conferences requires a 9-day stay and by the time it's over, my head is swimming with all sorts of ideas and things I want to do and learn more about. ASSM held their conference in a hotel on Navy Pier, which was a treat.

In recent years, I've tried to blog at the end of each day of my conference trips. That didn't happen this year -- I was more social in the evenings than usual, with takes time, and I had two presentations at NCTM to finish preparing for. I kept thinking I'd get around to writing some recaps, but maybe I'll settle for a few bullet points here:

• A decade ago, I joked with many people that if you wanted people to show up at your session, all you needed to do was name it something like, "Common Core iPad Games for the Flipped Classroom." I don't know what would get the equivalent amount of attention today, but surely it has "AI" in the title. I've seen a few AI presentations so far and I'm still waiting for one that (a) focuses on the use of AI in math education specifically and (b) is practical without too much hype / too little skepticism.
• There's a national momentum for reforming high school math. I don't know exactly what the results of that momentum will bring, but I hope it's great. What we currently have isn't serving enough of our students as well as it should.
• I used to read stories about how many baby boomer teachers would be retiring. I think we're on the other side of that now, and it feels like we have a lot of younger and more novice teachers who can really benefit from the support they get at conferences and in their other professional learning. I know what teachers can get out of a 60- or 90-minute conference session is limited, but the overall exposure to new ideas and the enthusiasm behind them is something I hope every teacher has a chance to experience.

Navy Pier, Chicago, is a great place to enjoy a conference

October 2024: Fall Math Pathways Summit

To put an explanation point on Colorado's math pathways work, the task force hosted a summit in Colorado Springs. About 100 people attended from all over, and there's a lot of excitement about the work.

Thanks to Pikes Peak State College for providing a great space for the Fall Math Pathways Summit

Coherence Gap Spreadsheet

I'm overdue in getting this out into the wider world, but I've developed a spreadsheet that incorporates all the coherence connections found in the Coherence Map and adds to that instructional time data about how many lessons and hours a math curriculum spends on each standard. Yeah, it's a lot. But as I talked to math teachers and leaders at the end of last spring, I felt there were a lack of tools available that incorporated both coherence and instructional time, and my solution was a big Excel workbook with lots and lots of rows of lesson data, some long VLOOKUP formulas, and some conditional formatting to make the results readable. If you geek out over spreadsheets and math curriculum planning, I think you'll like it.

The lesson data comes from EngageNY for K-5 and Illustrative Mathematics for Grades 6 through Algebra 2. I didn't have any special preference for one set of curriculum materials over any other (and neither does the State of Colorado), but both of these are open educational resources with lesson alignments and time estimates, so I used them. You can substitute time data in for whatever materials you'd like, but be warned that you're looking at 3500+ rows of data, so either bring a team of people with you or learn to write some code that scrapes data from publishers' websites and formats it for you. (I chose the latter.)

With the help of a pivot table and some lookup functions, what this spreadsheet allows you to do is indicate some percentage of coverage you thought each standard has gotten (if making sense of past curriculum decisions) or will get (if planning for future curriculum decisions). In return, the spreadsheet reports back to you how much instruction for each standard is left unfinished, and how much future instruction (following arrows in the Coherence Map) might be at risk. Just be mindful that the spreadsheet is like a lot of models—wrong, but possibly useful. The instructional time estimates might be flawed, not everything aligns as neatly as I'd like, the data may not really reflect your materials or pacing, and the crude way the coverage formulas work might just be wrong. So if it gives you some data that you just know is flawed, then maybe it is. But if you're patient with it, and you aren't afraid to look beyond the conditional formatting color scheme and dig more deeply into why instructional time is allocated where it is, then I think this spreadsheet can give you something to work with as you make decisions about your curriculum planning.

This was one of my on-the-job projects as math specialist for the Colorado Department of Education, so CDE is hosting the spreadsheet itself. Head on over to the Coherence Gap Spreadsheet page to download the latest version of the file. I also urge you to watch the tutorial video, which I'll also embed here. I kept it as short as I could at 12 minutes, and if you're already familiar with the Coherence Map you can skip the first 2:00.

If you have any questions about the spreadsheet, please let me know. And if you modify the spreadsheet to make it better or more inclusive of more curriculum materials, I'd really like to know about that, too.

Feeling around in the dark to understand the elephant of local control

The view from my new office.

Educationally, Colorado is a "local control" state, and I know this because I've heard many people say it. I once read something that said "there are only six local control states," and I assumed Colorado was one of them. (I also assume many more than six states would claim to belong on the list.) The document did not list the states or describe the difference between local and not-quite-local. But by all other accounts I've seen and heard, Colorado is a local control state.

Today was my first day in my new job at the Colorado Department of Education, and at almost every turn I was reminded of Colorado's status as a local control state. Before I go further, let me be clear: I see many positives in local control and generally favor it. I appreciate that historically and politically we've entrusted our schools to the communities they serve, and I cherish my rural school experiences where the tight bonds between the school and the community generate a special sense of pride and responsibility.

Local control is not to be confused with insular, however. I've never known a school district where teachers and district officials didn't seek resources and guidance from outside their boundaries. In my new job, I'm now one of those outsiders who can offer some of those resources and guidance. But as an employee of the state, I have to be rather careful about the resources and guidance I give, lest anyone be confused about whether control lies with the state or with the school district.

It's a bit awkward, as you might expect. And it's becoming apparent to me how local control influences the things a CDE employee decides they can and cannot say is, well, a little arbitrary. Maybe arbitrary isn't the right description, but rather there's some socio-normative set of unwritten rules guiding all this that aren't 100% logical. For example, we believe local districts have the power to make curriculum decisions, not the state. But what does that mean? For me, I know without a doubt this means I have no power as a state employee to require that a district, school, or teacher use a particular set of textbooks. Okay, that's clear to me, but can I recommend a textbook, while plainly stating that textbook choices are not the state's decision? Again, this is something we expressly avoid at CDE because we don't want to give districts the impression that they're not in control of their curriculum. Let's make this even fuzzier: If someone asks me what textbooks I've personally used and why I chose to use them, can I answer? I certainly hope so, as I'd feel silly not answering the question. But with my answer, I have to be cautious that what I say is not construed as some kind of state endorsement of a particular textbook. Why? Local control, that's why.

Yet, there are numerous areas where we, the citizens of Colorado and our elected representatives, have decided the state should have control. The state dictates sets of academic standards, which are accompanied by all sorts of supporting documents. The state also requires the administration of assessments that measure student performance towards those standards, and by law the results of those assessments are used to hold local educators accountable. Whether I approve or disapprove of these things is irrelevant in the current discussion, because I only name them to illustrate how the state has control over things that might not be textbooks or curriculum, yet have undeniable influence over local educators' choice of curriculum and related materials. We still claim to have a system of local control, but it shows that local vs. state control of schools is beyond a simple binary classification.

I'm reminded of a pair of sessions I attended at the Realistic Mathematics Education Conference in 2013. The first was from several people from CDE, who presented a series of standards implementation materials they developed in cooperation with local educators. The second presentation came from national curriculum developers from The Netherlands, who showed their new integrated STEM curriculum materials. Both groups sincerely wanted high-quality educational experiences for students, but CDE illustrated the more traditionally American approach of building out documents and tools to support local decision-makers, instead of developing student-facing curriculum materials, as seen in The Netherlands. Dutch schools are not required to use materials developed by their national curriculum office, so you can say there's still an element of local control there. But at a national/state level they do experience a broader set of options for what they produce for schools, and these options are supported by a different political and cultural climate than we generally find in the United States.

Without belaboring the issue much further, I hope by now you get a little sense of the tension I'm feeling in my new position. I'm grappling with my new role and how my actions and words will be shaped by issues of local control, this elephant in the dark room that I felt my hands on all day. A lot of "what-ifs" came to mind, and some of them yield unsatisfactory possibilities. I'm frustrated by thoughts of continually almost doing curriculum work, and I don't think anyone wants to produce supplementary documentation just for the sake of producing it. With what I currently see offered for mathematics from CDE, there's a lot of value in the details, but it's a pretty overwhelming mass of stuff at first (and second) glance. That's not going to change overnight, but for me, after Day 1 on the job, I think the best thing I can do is think openly about this and to explore the boundaries of what is reasonable and possible. Ultimately, I serve the teachers and educators of Colorado, and for now, I can be honest about the thought I put into these things, even if I don't anticipate easy answers anytime soon.

New year, new job

Exciting news! Starting January 19, I will be the new mathematics content specialist for the Colorado Department of Education (CDE). Whenever people would ask me about what kinds of jobs I might be interested in doing after grad school, I always mentioned this one or ones like it. It's a mixture of curriculum work, policy, assessment, teacher education, and communication — all the things I've focused on during my time as a graduate student. Of course, there's only one such job in the state of Colorado, so it was my good fortune that the job came open (relatively) near the end of my time as a graduate student. To help ease the transition, CDE is generously allowing me to start the job part-time while I complete work here at CU-Boulder. Thankfully, my new colleagues at CDE are well-aware of the challenges of finishing a Ph.D. and are willing to be flexible so that I can complete my degree. As educators I think we're all on the same page when it comes to helping students (even a supposedly grown-up one, like me) see their program through to the end.

What will the new job mean for this blog and my other online activities? If I have anything to say about it, the blogging, tweeting, Google-plussing, etc. will only get better. (I may even have to venture more frequently into Facebook for my professional use, as well as LinkedIn.) As a researcher (even the graduate student kind), there's a large expectation to share with others in the research community. But in this role as math specialist, I plan to make sharing of research, policy perspectives, projects and collaborations, etc. part of my full-time work, with the goal of bringing it to math educators across Colorado and beyond. I look forward to sharing more of the great work I see teachers doing, along with the hard-earned lessons we collectively learn along the way. I also look forward to bringing more transparency to a state agency. Yes, there are a few things I can't say on the job (for example, in Colorado the state doesn't tell school districts what curriculum to use), but to the extent I can keep sharing, I will!