An Organizational Perspective: ASSM Day 4, Costa Mesa

The 2021-2022 ASSM Board of Directors

The final day of the Annual Meeting of the Association of State Supervisors of Mathematics was a short one, with two sessions of board business and two big presentations. We finished at noon to give people time to travel home or get to NCSM, if they hadn't left already.

Mike Steele

President Joleigh Honey led us through the first business meeting portion before handing things over to Mike Steele, who presented a session to get us thinking about how we can leverage state systems to help modernize mathematics learning opportunities for students. In a twist, he used some deficit framing to start his talk, and acknowledged doing so to help establish some contrast for the asset-based approaches that we'd be thinking about the rest of the session. There was some thought-provoking ways in which standards are positioned in the work that we do as state supervisors of mathematics, and I'm eager to go back to his slides and references and dig into that a little deeper.

Kyndall Brown

Our final presentation was by Kyndall Brown, the executive director of the California Mathematics Project. California is a large state with multiple layers to its school support networks, and there are many ways these work with their NCTM affiliate, CMC (which itself has multiple parts and events), and other organizations to improve math teaching and learning statewide. Sometimes the efforts are at a high policy level, such as the state math frameworks, and sometimes they operate on a small, local level, like a scaled-up lesson study project that takes the experience of single students as its focal point. Few of us have the size or number of resources as California, but all of us have some people and some organizational assets ("organizational assets" was the conference theme of the day) that can operate on a similar, if not scaled-down, fashion in our states.

New ASSM President Lisa Ashe

The last bit of business was to thank the outgoing board members and pass leadership of the organization to the new board members, including our new president, Lisa Ashe of North Carolina. As Joleigh mentioned, Lisa has been operating more like a co-president rather than a typical president-elect, so this is going to be a smooth transition. Lisa is also the first African American to be president of ASSM, so it's a wonderful accomplishment for her and a sign of progress for our organization. Lisa's first act was to gavel the meeting closed. See you next year in Washington, D.C.!

Getting Interpersonal: ASSM Day 3, Costa Mesa

 

Problem solvers solving problems

Today at the ASSM Annual Meeting, we elevated yesterday's theme of personal assets to become a theme of interpersonal assets. We'd get to that soon enough, but first, we started the day with some math. I don't know what it's like in other content areas, but it's seen as good practice to take on a math task or two in any sort of professional development with math teachers and educators, and for the most part, we really enjoy it.

Mary Mooney (WI) and Anne Wallace (NH)

After a break, we transitioned to participating in two Potentials of Practice. This was an opportunity for two members, one in an elementary group and another in a secondary group, to pose an issue that is challenging them while the rest of us listened before participating in a structured discussion to help bring clarity. The secondary group tackled a communication issue while the elementary group (I think, as I wasn't in that group) dealt with negotiating some tensions between teaching practices and assessment practices. It felt like a great example of using our interpersonal assets, as we all share similar challenges yet there's enough diversity across the group that new ideas could come to the surface.

Megan Franke

We stayed in elementary and secondary groups as we moved to breakout sessions, something we used sparingly in this year's program. Both leveraged assets local to the Los Angeles area. Megan Franke of UCLA joined us for a session called "Supporting the Mathematical Brilliance of Young People," in which we watched some amazing examples of student reasoning and learned the results of recent research that involved interviews of almost 500 preschoolers. Some of the key findings: Students are better at counting if there's some purpose to their counting. Researchers assumed that students could count further if asked to simply count out loud than if they were asked to count objects, but the opposite turned out to be true. And when given 8 little plastic bears to count, lined up in a row, the students showed less counting skill than when given 31 pennies to count from a pile. Maybe it shouldn't surprise us at this point, but this feels like another instance where the more authentic the task, the more students seem to shine.

Brian Lawler

In the secondary breakout session, Brian Lawler, Bryan Meyer, and Abi Leaf described their multi-year efforts at high school math reform in a session called, "Designing a System to Provoke Change - in Actions and Beliefs." I've seen them present multiple times before, so I spent more time in Megan's session, but I know they were able to synthesize and reflect on some things and I'm hoping to hear more about what they presented.

Rachel Lambert

The afternoon returned to sharing perspectives about what being an ASSM member means. To some people, it means an awful lot and they seem happy to share it. These moments tend to swing towards the emotional and away from the informational, which doesn't interest me, but not everything at a conference has to be for me. From there, we went right into a session that I think is going to stick with people for a long time. Rachel Lambert presented "Equitable Systems of Mathematics," but it could have been named something like, "Special Education Mathematics Instruction is Broken." Rachel is a great presenter and a straight shooter, and the evidence she presented made it clear that this really isn't a problem inherent in individual educators, either in the regular math classroom or in special education settings. It's really the interaction of many interpersonal and systemic factors, not the least of which is a seemingly incompatible set of theoretical perspectives driving practices on the two sides.

Shannon Olson (UT)

There's just a half day left of this year's ASSM Annual Meeting. It's gone by quickly and I think a lot of that comes from having such a tight program with high-quality sessions. And tomorrow's presenters aren't likely to be any different. Then it's on to Anaheim and NCSM.

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.