Pondering Personal Assets: ASSM Day 2, Costa Mesa

The 2022 ASSM group photo. (Thanks for the photo-taking assist, Ken Krehbiel!)

I was a little skeptical when we the program committee discussed possible themes for this year's ASSM Annual Meeting, mostly because I've been to a lot of good conferences where the theme began and ended with a single line on the cover of the program book. And they were still good conferences! But thankfully, the other members of the program committee were more optimistic than I was, and they came up with a theme that focused on asset-based perspectives. Not only that, but we tried to tweak the theme for each day and have sessions to match. The theme for today was personal assets and we were on track right from the start.

Dr. Patrick Callahan of Math ANEX

Patrick Callahan gave a great session called, "Asset-based Assessments: Design and Systemic Impacts." Honestly, there's some low-hanging fruit here that works great for getting an audience of educators on the same page. The way we assess students -- with standardized and standardized-styled test, especially -- reflect deficit-based perspectives on what students know, or more accurately, don't know. Patrick had some really great examples, one of which was a composite area problem that could be solved by finding the sum of the area of two rectangles. When students get such a problem incorrect, and we don't look any further, we conclude students didn't learn. But when Patrick led us through a study of students' most common wrong answers, you got a much better idea of what students were bringing to the problem. Now, of course, nothing is perfect. Students who leave the answer blank or write "idk" still don't give you much to work with. But students who understand its a composite area problem but make a computational mistake are in a very different place than a student who multiplies all the dimensions together because they know when it comes to areas and rectangles, multiplying the length of the sides is how to get an answer. Along with some other helpful examples, Patrick helped us all think about better ways to use assessment results to focus on what students know, rather than what they don't.

Assistant Secretary Roberto J. Rodriguez

One of the perks of being in ASSM is that we bring in high-ranking people who understand our roles as state-level specialists who bridge the worlds of policy and practice. For this year's meeting, we were joined by Roberto J. Rodriguez, Assistant Secretary of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Education. He covered a number of different national priorities and challenges, such as improving teacher recruiting and retention, the impact of the latest NAEP scores, and how the current culture wars are distracting from the good work that's being done and more good work that needs to be done. ASSM members use these visits to help press the USDOE on some issues, like the need for fresh approaches to accountability post-NCLB and why PAEMST awardees don't get more recognition.

NCSM President Paul Gray

We also received a visit from Trena Wilkerson, the president of NCTM, and Paul Gray, the president of NCSM. We got a sneak peek at an upcoming project that looks to build on the ideas of Catalyzing Change, and you can expect more to be shared as the week progresses and as work gets underway. We also got to see some of the new and upcoming publications coming from NCTM, and heard that they'll be refreshing their advocacy toolkit.

NCTM President Trena Wilkerson

Trena stuck around to deliver a second session, titled "Developing, Strengthening and Supporting Mathematics Instructional Systems Through Asset-Based Approaches." Again, fitting the theme for the day, we had time to listen, learn, and share with other members some of the ways we can recognize and build from the assets students bring to the classroom.

Christine Koerner (OK) and Diana Kasbaum (WI)

Lastly, we also took a few moments throughout the day to conduct ASSM business and reflect on our organization at 60 years old. Diana Kasbaum of Wisconsin shared some of her reflections, and Anne Mikesell of Ohio led an "In Memoriam" moment for a former member who passed last year. There's a timeline on the wall with some artifacts of annual meetings gone by, like copies of some old programs and other materials people gathered from past events. We each added ourselves to the timeline to mark when we each joined, and it's a skewed distribution, as you'd expect. I'm inching towards the veteran group at almost 7 years being a member, but that's a long way from the likes of Steve Leinwand and Cathy Seeley, who've been active for more than 30 years.

Back on the Conference Circuit: ASSM Day 1, Costa Mesa

Do I remember how to do this? Both the traveling and the blogging?

I'm in Costa Mesa, California, for the first in my tripleheader of math education conferences, the Annual Meeting of the Association of State Supervisors of Mathematics. If you're not familiar with ASSM, that's okay. It's a small professional organization only open to people who have a job like mine, or to associate members who used to have a job like mine. For me, ASSM has the highest percentage of friendly faces and the most sympathetic ears of all the conferences I attend.

 

It was a challenging travel day. Security lines at Denver International Airport wrapped around the building, then our plane broke and we had to get a replacement crew. We finally were in the air after a 2.5-hour delay. Then I single-handedly battled California car culture by walking from the airport to the hotel. Navigating away from the airport on foot was a bit tricky and I admit there's not much beauty in walking alongside 10 lanes of traffic, but I'm glad I did it. If nothing else, it's a good way to get in lots of steps and it helped me deal with the carbon on my conscience after a flight.

 

With the delays, I missed the first half of the opening session of the ASSM meeting. When I got there, Steve Leinwand and Cathy Seeley were holding court, sharing stories from their many years of membership in ASSM, and sharing wisdom about what we can get from our time in ASSM and what opportunities we have to pay it forward. ASSM turns 60 this year and I enjoy math ed history, so I hope to hear more tales before the weekend is done.

Announcing announce@list.mathed.net

"Maybe someday you could continue Jerry Becker's email listserv." --David Webb, circa 2015

Dr. Jerry Becker died on April 16 at the age of 85, leaving behind his wife, three children, many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and a very useful set of email listservs. By way of my Ph.D., Dr. Becker is an academic great-uncle of mine, although I never had the pleasure of meeting him. I can't pretend to fill his shoes, but there is something I can do to continue in his tradition by providing a service similar to what he offered for so many years.

Today I'm announcing announce@list.mathed.net. (Self-subscribe here.) It's an email distribution list to share the kinds of things people used to share through Dr. Becker: job openings, conference announcements, requests for articles for journal issues, and other items of interest to the mathematics education community. Instead of sending items to me, subscribers to the list can email the list address directly and I'll moderate items along that appear legitimate and useful. I'll tweak things along the way and, if there's demand for additional lists or services, I can consider offering them. The service is provided by an international GNU Mailman host. The software isn't flashy, but it works and isn't going anywhere. I may not live to 85 to keep hosting the list like Dr. Becker did, but I'll stick around as long as I can and I won't be surprised if Mailman sticks around that long, too.

So who am I and why am I doing this? I'm the mathematics specialist at the Colorado Department of Education, and prior to that I was a high school math teacher and a Ph.D. student at CU Boulder. Regardless if I was working in practice, research, or policy, I've been interested in the organization of education communities and how they communicate ideas. This includes professional organizations, Twitter, the Global Math Department, and forums like MyNCTM. Under the mathed.net domain, I've blogged and maintained a wiki, and at one time spun up an experimental instance of a social network using free software. In my current role with CDE I operate the CoMath listserv, which has been in existence since 1995, and I help edit the Colorado Mathematics Teacher journal. My advisor, David Webb, made the comment above somewhat offhandedly partway through my graduate school experience and it's stuck in my head ever since. Dr. Becker didn't leave his listservs to a successor, and the subscription lists they contained are (as they should be) the private information of his university. But that doesn't mean we can't try starting anew to continue the old.

I've long believed that if mathematics teachers and educators are going to all be part of a professional community, it's going to take many different related sub-communities in many different forms, using different technologies, membership structures, languages, and different target audiences. We're too numerous to all huddle under one hashtag, and too smart to think that our ideas could—or should—fit in one place. Maybe others will start email list services of their own to meet a particular need, or find other ways to communicate. That would be excellent. The more the merrier. We all have a part in this, and my next part is to moderate a new email list. So if you have something to share, or need to have things shared with you, I'll be at announce@list.mathed.net waiting for you to subscribe and post your messages.

Update: The nomination for Elizabeth Fennema's NCTM Lifetime Achievement Award has been submitted!

The materials for Elizabeth Fennema's nomination for an NCTM Lifetime Achievement Award have been submitted! When I started this a few weeks ago (see my previous post), I really didn't know how much support I'd get. But do you know what? I found out that if you mention Fennema's name in the subject of your email, her collaborators and colleagues will reply, write letters, share petitions, and tell you stories. So I must thank Megan Franke, Jodean Grunow, Janice Gratch (with help from early CGI study teachers!), Linda Levi, and Walter Secada for writing five wonderful letters of recommendation. And I also need to thank David Webb, Meg Meyer, and Diana Kasbaum for helping to connect me with these generous friends of Elizabeth's, and to thank Farshid Safi for providing a list of Fennema's doctoral students. I didn't ask the letter writers for permission to share their letters to the world, but I'm posting the rest of the nomination materials below. We ended up with 276 co-signers of the nomination, including previous NCTM Lifetime Awardees Johnny Lott, Ed Dickey, Ed Silver, Frank Lester, Judith Jacobs, Douglas Grouws, Shirley Frye, and Mary Lindquist. Signatures were still coming in when I finalized the letter, so my apologies if you signed late today and your name didn't get included by the time I needed to email the nomination to NCTM. (I see you, Cathy Seeley!)

 

Let's Get Elizabeth Fennema an NCTM Lifetime Achievement Award

Elizabeth Fennema

I've never met Elizabeth Fennema and she retired long ago. But I know her body of work, and I believe she's conspicuously absent from NCTM's list of Lifetime Achievement Award winners. I've mentioned this on Twitter in the past in the hopes that someone who worked with her would snap to action, but this year I'm taking matters into my own hands and coordinating a nomination. And I'm giving you a chance to help me.

I'm assembling a letter of nomination and resume in a Google Doc that is open to public comments. Beyond this, I need up to 5 letters of recommendations. If you want to write one of the letters, let me know at raymond@mathed.net. I'll be recruiting a few potential letter writers personally, but will take any help people wish to offer. I encourage you to sign this petition in support of her nomination, and I'll collect names from this petition and include them as co-signers of the letter of nomination.

If you don't know Elizabeth Fennema or why she deserves an NCTM Lifetime Achievement Award, keep reading for a short biography of her below. You can also read her biographies on Wikipedia and the University of St. Andrews. And don't forget to review and contribute to the letter of nomination, resume and petition.

Elizabeth Fennema Biography:

Elizabeth Fennema is an Emerita Professor of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her active career in mathematics spanned about 40 years, starting as a graduate student at UW-Madison in the 1960s, then as a faculty member until the mid-90s, then continuing in retirement as an emerita professor.

Fennema is known for two field-changing bodies of work, either of which alone would be worthy of lasting recognition. First is her work about gender in mathematics. After publishing a review of gender differences literature in JRME in 1974, she teamed with Julia Sherman to produce what are now known as the Fennema-Sherman studies. With methodological rigor and new measurement tools (the Fennema-Sherman Scales), the pair redefined knowledge and perspectives on the intersection between gender and achievement in mathematics, showing that under-performance by females was sociocultural in nature and a function of opportunity, and not due to differences in biology.

In the 1980s, Fennema combined with Thomas Carpenter and others for another grand body of work, now known as Cognitively Guided Instruction and summarized for teachers in the book Children’s Mathematics. The research program was a model for applying new theories of constructivism to children’s mathematics learning, and took equally seriously the development of professional development to empower teachers to use their findings to improve elementary mathematics education. Few, if any, mathematics research programs to date have been as comprehensive, rigorous, and beneficial to the field of mathematics education as CGI.

NCTM’s book Classics in Mathematics Education Research (2004) contains articles representing both of these bodies of work (Fennema & Sherman, 1977; Carpenter, Fennema, Peterson, Chiang, & Loef, 1989), making Elizabeth Fennema the only author with two articles recognized as classics in mathematics education. According to citation counts in Google Scholar, Fennema has authored 7 articles or books that have been cited over 1000 times. Searching the JSTOR archives of the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education for “Fennema” yields 431 results, putting her ahead of her contemporaries Thomas Romberg (332 results) and Douglas Grouws (379 results), both NCTM Lifetime Achievement Award recipients. Fennema served NCTM as the chair of the Research Advisory Committee in the late 1970s and was on the JRME editorial panel from 1977-1979, in addition to editing a number of books co-published by the council in the 1980s and 1990s. Fennema has been awarded for her work by the American Educational Research Association and the Association for Women in Mathematics Education, holds an honorary doctorate from Mount Mary College, and was named a member of the National Academy of Education in 1997.