I C U N D C: NCTM Annual Meeting Day 2

Today began with a presentation I really didn't want to miss: Mine! I joined up with Lisa Ashe and Denise Schulz from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction to deliver a session on advocacy. We talked about governance structures, sources for strengthening your argument, and where to find allies before giving participants about 30 minutes to discuss advocacy strategies in small groups. We had some scenarios for them to consider but they were welcome to bring up their own topics, too. Special thanks to April Pforts, our Iowa colleague, for joining us and helping with the small group facilitation.

W Gary Martin

I next moved to a session from W. Gary Martin and Mariya Rosenhammer from Auburn University. They presented data that they collected about what math is needed for different college majors and the results add to the really strong argument that high school math should include more and better opportunities for students to learn statistics. It was a really solid presentation and the room was near capacity.

John Seelke

I then caught a 30-minute session by John Seelke, a PAEMST awardee who wished to talk about the current state of discourse in our profession and some ways we can try to remain open to others' ideas. It's awfully easy these days to quickly determine that someone's views might not align with your own and to shut them out before really trying to understand where they are coming from.

Steve Leinwand

After a great lunch with Ralph Pantozzi (another PAEMST awardee -- so nice to be in good company), I checked in with Steve Leinwand's session about high school math. I suspected it was going to be things I was mostly familiar with, and it was, but it seemed like the right place to be after having a head full of morning ideas and a stomach full of noontime lunch.

From there, I decided to head to the exhibit hall. As someone who isn't in the classroom and who isn't in a position to purchase anything, a lot of what's in the exhibit hall isn't for me. But that doesn't mean there isn't a lot to learn and people to catch up with. I checked in with PhET, who I've always held in high regard since I learned about them and got to know the team while I was in grad school at CU Boulder. I also spent a lot of time at the PAEMST booth, just to talk about the program and some of the work we're collectively doing to keep it going and try to improve it each year. I caught up with Leslie Dietiker, a math educator at Boston University who I was in a working group with years ago at an ISDDE conference. She works with CPM, and visiting their booth is always interesting since those are the texts I began my teaching career with 20 years ago. I moved on and heard about some new work from Math Recovery which might introduce their approaches to elementary math intervention to a larger number of teachers who wouldn't otherwise attend their regular workshops. Lastly, I spent a long time with Cathy Fosnot and Ryan Dent at the New Perspectives booth. I've known of Cathy and her work for a long time now through our shared relationship with the curriculum designers at the Freudenthal Institute and their extension in the U.S. at CU Boulder. We chatted about the state of curriculum development and reviewing and what might be on the horizon and Ryan showed off an innovative approach they're taking to assessment and progress tracking.

This is where the NCTM Annual Meeting becomes more than just a chance to attend sessions and keynotes and browse products in person. It's a chance to talk to people all day long and hear their ideas and ask them your questions and do the same in return. Some of those people are new to me, some I've seen year after year. One moment I'm in the hallway with a teacher from Glenwood Springs whom I've never met, but we have a shared passion for making high school math better, and the next moment I'm chatting with NCTM President Kevin Dykema and he's volunteering to join one of our book study sessions for a book he co-authored. NCTM's not the only place math educators can find a professional community, but it sure can be a good place for it when you spend multiple days in a conference space with other members.

Research and Practice: NCTM Research Conference Day 2 and NCTM Annual Meeting Day 1

Today started at 8 am and I snuck in a little late to see Charles Honensee and Sara Gartland of the University of Delaware present about backward transfer. It's an interesting phenomenon when something students learn later has an impact -- sometimes intentional, sometimes not, and sometimes negative -- on something learned earlier. They reported on a high school quadratics unit that was taught in such a way to improve earlier learning on linear functions, which was a nice result to see.

Sara Gartland

I then went to a series of talks about language and discourse in secondary math. First, a group including Jonathan Foster, Laura Singletary, AnnaMarie Conner, and Hyejin Park (from a variety of universities) described a framework for describing displays. What's a display? It took me a moment to wrap my head around it, but it could be a lot of things, but in most classrooms you're thinking about how teachers and students use whiteboards, Smartboards, posters, and artifacts of student work to display information. I could kind of get a sense for how having a framework to describe these things could help future research studies organize some of their work.

Sarah Roberts

Sarah Roberts of the University of Santa Barbara went next and talked about how to support teachers in including language routines into the curriculum that they develop and find when it isn't there already. With more than 70% of high school teachers reporting that they create their own materials on a nearly daily basis, this kind of work is needed in the secondary grades. The last presentation was from Madeleine Chowdhury from Mesa Community College, and she talked about the role of discourse she's observing in a research study with some of her students.

Madeleine Chowdhury

I went to a research in progress session and heard from some folks from Cal State Sacramento who are working on some quantitative reasoning courses and research to support them. That went well with another researcher at the table, Veronica Cambra-Faraci, who is following up with and learning from former students who took Geometry and Algebra 2 together at the same time in her high school as a way of accelerating to calculus their senior year.

Kyndall Brown

The plenary session was a combination of talks. First, Kyndall Brown from the California Mathematics Project talked about how research informed California's math frameworks.Next, Joleigh Honey from Utah talked about the importance of working across stakeholder groups to affect change in mathematics education. Lastly, and clearly the highlight of the day, was Rachel Lambert from The University of California, Santa Barbara. She's positioned herself and her work at the intersection of special education and mathematics education, and had A LOT of things to say about how these two worlds have traditionally been separated and the impacts it has on how we conduct and interpret research and, more importantly, what it does for the experiences of special education students in mathematics. This talk was well-timed with recent campaigns to come up with a "science of math" that seems to grossly misinterpret research to make claims about teaching all students. The talk wasn't really long enough to work patiently through all the details, but this is an important topic and I hope it encourages more researchers to work beyond those traditional boundaries to find consensus solutions.

In one final session, I joined five people from NC State who are working on a microcredentialing system. As the only participant in the session, I got all the attention I could have wanted, for sure. Sometimes that's just how conference sessions work out.

Jamila Dugan

The NCTM Annual Meeting kicked off with the usual Wednesday night ceremonies, including recognizing the service of the NCTM Board, the program committee, the local hosting affiliates, and honoring the newest NCTM Lifetime Achievement Awardees. This year, that was Joan Ferrini-Mundy and Betty Phillips. I talked about Joan Ferrini-Mundy yesterday, and if you've ever used the Connected Mathematics Project (CMP) materials from Michigan State, then you've benefited directly from Betty Phillips's work. That was followed by the keynote address, delivered by Jamila Dugan, co-author of the book Street Data. She encouraged us to get past "traps and tropes" when talking about equity and listen more to the people and signals closest to our students, and better recognize how it can compliment and make up for the limitations of our larger-scale data collection, such as with state and national testing.

Making Math Education Matter: NCTM Research Conference Day 1, Washington D.C.

It's so good to be back at the NCTM Research Conference! This is one of my favorite conferences: it's a mostly no-frills, just the facts, math ed nerdfest with an amount of academic awkwardness that I find really welcoming.

Abi Leaf, Chair of the NCTM Research Committee

Day 1 of the Research Conference got off to a great start. Our opening session featured Joan Ferrini-Mundy. She's the current President of the University of Maine, a former chief operating officer of the National Science Foundation, a former director at the National Academy of Sciences, and long-time mathematics education researcher. Very few people have held the variety of high-level positions that Joan has, and that helped her craft some perspectives for her opening session.

This talk started in familiar territory, with reminders that it's foolish to think that we'll ever get the "perfect study" that answers our questions about math education once and for all. Joan also noted the flawed logic that researchers need only push out their work in traditional outlets and depend on educators to soak up those ideas and know how to use them. Instead, Joan said, math educators need to use new and varied approaches to research (shout-out to some I've done, like research-practice partnerships and design-based implementation research) and insert themselves in spaces where decisions are made about math education. The rest of the talk went into details about what those spaces look like and the kind of contributions we could make, including spaces for university administrators, state and federal policymakers, assessment and standards developers, funders, higher education STEM faculty, the business sector, and teacher educators.

Joan Ferrini-Mundy

My next session was a panel called "Supporting Elementary Teachers' Mathematics Classroom Discussion Practices." It was good to see the newest work from some researchers I admire and enjoy watching present, and some of what they said had a lot of relevance for me. 

Lynsey Gibbons

First up was Lynsey Gibbons from the University of Delaware. In working with teachers at a couple elementary schools during the pandemic, she noted the need for schools to be true learning spaces -- not just spaces to organize typical learning for students, but spaces for adults to learn, too, as challenges of the pandemic brought about the need to try new and different things, and to do so while considering all the local and not-so-local contexts in which schooling happens. While her study didn't appear to set out to be about Zearn, we heard a lot about Zearn. The schools in her study adopted Zearn as part of a statewide program that gave schools easy and free access, and the schools expected Zearn to be used as part of regular instruction. Some teachers found it frustrating; instead of teaching themselves, they monitored students sitting at computers wearing headphones who were getting taught by videos of teaching. When students got stuck they raised their hand, and then it became the job of the teacher in the room to figure out what had been shown to the student in the videos they'd been shown and then re-teach that content or otherwise get the student back on track. Some teachers quietly (or maybe not-so-quietly) rebelled and switched to using a "regular" classroom curriculum by the year's end.

Annie Garrison-Wilhelm

Next up was Annie Garrison-Wilhelm, now faculty at Washington State University. She looked at what could be learned about improving math teaching by examining teaching practices across multiple content areas, and how that shaped what she called "a vision for dialogic disciplinary discussion." One of her results was that teachers tended to make a stronger case for preparing students to engage in the disciplinary community in math and science than they do when teaching literacy, which seems like a good thing for math.

Sam Prough and Rebecca Memmolo

Sam Prough and Rebecca Memmolo from the University of Delaware continued this theme of looking across content areas. Their research identified some struggles, like when teachers or school administrators see math as not something that requires debate and discussion since there's only "one right answer" to elementary math problems.

Temple Walkowiak

Temple Walkowiak from NC State served as the discussant and brought some of the ideas together across the sessions. There was a lot to think about here, and Lynsey's thinking at the beginning about local and beyond-local context reminded me about the role I play to normalize some positive practices and perceptions about math education and the need to work across disciplines to help elementary teachers make sense of the practices that work best in different content areas.

Robert Krakehl

I checked into a "research in progress" session where we sat at roundables with researchers in the midst of figuring out their latest work. I enjoyed hearing from two researchers from Amplify, Heather West and Sandra Pappas, who are developing screeners and diagnostic assessment tools for K-8 mathematics. We're doing some similar work in Colorado and it's good to know we're not alone. I then moved rooms and caught the end of Robert Krakehl's session about AP Mathematics Enrollment and Performance. In short, AP tests consistently favor White and Asian students. This wasn't new news, and it's wasn't Robert's talk to try to explain all the reasons why. Instead, he focused on making sense of the data, and one thing we did observe was that the Calculus BC exam has significantly higher pass rates across the board when compared to Calculus AB and AP Statistics. Perhaps it's a self-selection issue, where only the best-prepared students are encouraged to take it.

Pat Herbst

Next was a panel comparing innovative models for mathematics teacher learning. Pat Herbst from Michigan started off with what he's learning from their StoryCircles project, which uses cartoon-like classroom simulations to develop teacher thinking and decision-making skills.

Hilda Borko

Next up was Hilda Borko of Stanford, who reflected on two different teacher learning models that she's helped establish, the problem-solving cycle and the teacher leadership preparation model. These have been developed in research-practice partnerships and make use of classroom video to generate discussion and reflection on teaching practice.

Hollylynn Lee

Hollylynn Lee from NC State is working on online professional development models for statistics and data science as part of their instepwithdata.org initiative.

Gil Schwarts

The discussant for this session was Gil Schwarts from the University of Michigan. She helped us think about these teacher learning programs as either content-oriented or process-oriented, as well as adaptive or specified, and how goals and tensions of each project are served by their different designs.

Whew! If that wasn't enough, the day ended with a poster session. If you remember social distancing from the pandemic, this was certainly not that. We were all crammed into a too-small and too-noisy space but I got a few things from the posters I visited. My highlight was probably meeting Jinfa Cai. He was the editor of JRME and NCTM's research compendium, and I have a lot of admiration for people who can take on those kinds of big editing projects.

Why We Do What We Do: NCTM Day 4, Los Angeles

Data science panel with Mahmoud Harding on the microphone

I needed to sleep in a little and then pack my bags and check out of my hotel, so I didn't get to the convention center until the second set of sessions. I headed for a panel presentation about data science but missed the introductions. The program book said the speakers were Anna Bargagliotti, Mahmoud Harding, Hollylynne Lee, and Susan Peters, but I think that lineup might have changed. I've been in a lot of data science discussions over the past year so I'm not sure how much of this was new to me, but the Q&A revealed to me that there are a growing number of resources out there that a lot of people simply don't know about. (Note: datascience4all.org is a good place to start.) We really are still in the early stages of this, as was evidenced by one panelist explaining that he teaches in one of the largest districts in California, with 200 math teachers across 12 high schools, and he's the only one teaching a data science course.

Megan Burton

I've never been to the AMTE conference (that's the Association for Mathematics Teacher Educators) but I occasionally attend an AMTE-focused session at the NCTM or NCSM conference. I do that partly for the information, but partly to figure out if I have a place in that organization. As a math specialist in a state department of education, part of my role involves providing professional development to teachers and I occasionally get to work with licensure and endorsement policies for teachers. But unlike most (all?) of AMTE's members, I'm not a higher education faculty member charged with the education of preservice teachers. This session, led by Megan Burton, was titled "Mentoring, Challenging, and Empowering: AMTE's Standards for Preparing Teachers of Mathematics." I think I would have liked hearing about the standards, but the first half focused on mentoring and that's not an aspect of my job and therefore wasn't as relevant to me.

I might have stayed in the AMTE session until then end, but I wanted to catch a 30-minute session called "Creating and Sustaining a Free Mathematics Conference to Empower Educators." It was led by Cody Osterhout and Paul Volkert, two educators in a New York BOCES (bureau of cooperative educational services) who creeated a math conference with very simple and humble beginnings and have grown it over the past five years. I'm fortunate that our state math conference is well-established, but I wanted that 30 minutes to look at conferences through a fresh set of eyes and to consider what's essential and what's extra as we adjust our conference to meet changing needs and varying levels of participation.

José Vilson

I somehow made it all week without hearing about anyone who couldn't participate in the conference due to COVID, and then Eugenia Cheng, our closing speaker, had to cancel on short notice because she got COVID! I'm sure she wasn't the only one, but it was probably too much to hope for that nobody would get sick all week. So that left the program committee in a bind -- what can you do to replace a keynote speaker with about 48 hours notice? You take advantage of having José Vilson on your program committee, that's what. José's an experienced keynote speaker with experience on the big stage at NCTM, having delivered the Iris Carl address in 2019. He wasn't the most prepared, or dressed like he might have for a keynote, but he quickly put together a talk called "A Moment of Hope: Why We Do What We Do." The talked moved a bit like a series of Ignite sessions, with maybe 5-minute chapters highlighting different reasons for teaching and working with youth. Perhaps the most impactful was José's collage of photos of former students of his who have gone on to become teachers.

So long, L.A., and thanks for the bikes

The final bit of business to conclude the 2022 Annual Meeting was for Trena Wilkerson to hand over the presidency of NCTM to Kevin Dykema. Kevin is a middle school teacher from Michigan and has long been involved as an NCTM board member and as a member of various committees. It's always nice to see a teacher lead an organization of teachers, and I have a sense that Kevin is going to do great. There will be a lot of NCTM activities in the meantime, but next year's conference is set for Washington, D.C. We were there in 2018, which really wasn't long ago, but it's a great place for the conference because the population density is high and that helps improve turnout. I like visiting D.C., and there are still a ton of museums and cultural attractions I want to see, so I'm looking forward to it already.

From Business to Baseball: NCTM Day 3, Los Angeles

Trena Wilkerson (on her last full day as NCTM President!)

I started my day at the NCTM business meeting. I wouldn't recommend that most people go to the business meeting, but for the few of us who like getting an update on the health and direction of NCTM, it's the place to be. It's unfortunate to see that NCTM's budget finished in the red, again, but given how rough it's been with events and the pandemic, things could have been much worse. Membership stands at about 29,000, with about half of those opting for the essential membership tier.

Nicole Joseph

Next I went to the Iris Carl Address. This year's speaker was Nicole Joseph of Vanderbilt University, and she had a very well-prepared talk to help us confront some of the inequities and biases faced by Black girls. At the end, I noted that she charged her fellow researchers to push to do large-scale, quantitative research studies. She explained that while we've learned a great deal from the many small-sample, qualitative studies, if research is going to affect policy, state and national decision-makers are going to want big studies with some statistical power. I'm really not doing the session justice with my brief summary, so be thankful that this is one of the sessions that NCTM records and makes available to watch after the conference.

At noon I met up with my co-presenters, Fred Peck and David Webb. David was our advisor at CU Boulder and we've established this wonderful tradition of presenting together each year at NCTM. This was the first time we've seen each other since the San Diego conference in the spring of 2019, so we did a little bit of prep and lots of catching up with each other. Our 2:45 session, "Making Meaning of Systems of Equations with Contexts and Representations," went very well. We've done versions of this one before, and each time we seem to get a bit better at it. We had a good audience, but had room for more, and I think those in attendance got a lot out of it.

W. Gary Martin and Jean Lee

David and I caught the last 20 minutes or so of a late session called "We Need More Math Teachers! Changing the Narrative About Mathematics Teaching as a Career." Jean Lee and Gary Martin were the lead speakers for the session, and just with the bits we saw it was really useful. Essentially, they're involved in an effort to share positive things about being a teacher. And it's not just their opinion -- this is part of a broader project that has collected data and surveyed teachers and when you look at the data, the salaries, working conditions, and retirement benefits are more favorable than the news headlines might lead you to believe. I'll have to check out the materials later, and connect with some of the Colorado folks who are involved in the research.

It's time for Dodger baseball!

Finally, I got really adventurous with the Metro bike share system and pedaled up to Dodger Stadium to see the Dodgers play the Rockies. The bike ride was probably more memorable than the game, as the Dodgers had a 9-0 lead by the time I left during the 7th inning stretch. Afterwards, I biked all the way back to USC, which is about a 6 mile trip. Add that on top of an almost 17,000-step day, and I'm pretty beat. But just one half day left of #NCTMLA22, and then I can rest!