- Matt McLeod
- http://ltd.edc.org/people/matt-mcleod
- Project Director
- Mathematics Immersion for Secondary Teachers (at Scale)
- http://mist.edc.org/
- Education Development Center
- Al Cuoco
- Distinguished Scholar
- Mathematics Immersion for Secondary Teachers (at Scale)
- http://mist.edc.org/
- Education Development Center
- Evelyn Gordon
- Sr. Researcher
- Mathematics Immersion for Secondary Teachers (at Scale)
- http://mist.edc.org/
- Horizon Research, Inc.
- Daniel Heck
- http://www.horizon-research.com/about-hri/staff/daniel-j-heck
- Vice President
- Mathematics Immersion for Secondary Teachers (at Scale)
- http://mist.edc.org/
- Horizon Research, Inc.
Public Discussion
Continue the discussion of this presentation on the Multiplex. Go to Multiplex
Matt McLeod
Project Director
Hello! Excited to be a part of this week and such a great event. We hope you enjoy the video. We would also love to hear from you. To kick off the week -
What opportunities do you have to do mathematics (or whatever content you teach or support) with colleagues for the sake of learning and enjoyment? What do you find beneficial about that?
Kirstin Milks
Science Teacher
Hello, MIST team! I love this idea of building group-worthy tasks that are as interesting for grownups as they are for younger learners and grounding them in a UDL lens. I facilitate a fair amount of professional development around justice-oriented science curriculum, especially climate change, and I agree that having teachers wear their "student hats," then reflect on a task using their "teacher hats," is a powerful model.
I'm curious about the move you made, in shifting to online facilitation, of having groups work together in person and be networked by video -- rather than having individuals join from their respective homes/workspaces and connect in breakout rooms to do the work. I'm wondering whether you've collected or plan to collect any data around that setup. It seems like it might be a fantastic way to bridge trans-regional impact with keeping participants feeling connected and engaged!
Kimberly Elliott
Daniel Heck
Vice President
Thanks so much for your comments and interest, Kristin.
The MIST model is intended to support immersive mathematics for communities of teachers in any locale connected to other sites virtually. So we tested a hybrid approach where local groups meet in person and 2-5 of those groups join a facilitator in synchronous online sessions. When that approach was no longer possible, existing sites transitioned to working in online breakout rooms and we had a new course group engage with no face-to-face meetings. What we’ve seen is that both approaches enable an experience of mathematics immersion, and tools are available and evolving for sharing mathematical work and doing mathematics together. In the same ways the original face-to-face meetings paralleled what student groupwork could be like in classrooms, virtual breakout rooms reflected how student groupwork could occur in remote instruction. As you’ve pointed out, it gave teachers a chance to experience what their students were encountering; to see firsthand what it is like to do and learn mathematics through remote engagement. So they could think about the challenges and opportunities of the remote environment as both a teacher and a learner.
We’re curious to know how other professional development programs might already have been suited to remote connection or adapted over the last year. Please share what you’ve done and what you’ve learned!
Kirstin Milks
Kimberly Elliott
Sarah Haavind
Senior Research Project Manager
Hi Matt! Thank you for sharing this cool project! I was excited to see your teacher Matt Johnson in Bend Oregon because my home office desk is next door in Redmond, also along the Deschutes River where perhaps he made his shot for this video! I love the idea of immersion and exploring what math community looks like/sounds like - how it unfolds - and giving the teachers the experience you hope they will orchestrate for their students. It was great to see that connection made by one of your teachers, that she, as a teacher participant felt the same way her students then felt in her classroom. Nice! Thanks for the window! Can you tell us more about how you are measuring outcomes of the immersion experience? Are you able to capture how students are learning concepts as a result?
~Sarah
Daniel Heck
Vice President
Hi Sarah. A primary goal of MIST has been to establish the means to make professional development through mathematical immersion accessible to teachers anywhere without the travel and time commitments residential programs involve. So it is interesting that you recognize the scene Matt Johnson chose! In fact, hundreds of teachers all over the United States have worked with us to figure out how to make this program viable. That's been the first focus of our research, to determine if and how the MIST model supports professional learning experiences of mathematical immersion, mathematical community, and connections to teaching. To address those questions, we're analyzing recordings of the MIST sessions in 14 course groups representing more than 50 local sites, along with interviews of the course facilitators, site leaders, and a sample of participating teachers. We're also investigating influences the experience has on teachers and teaching through surveys about beliefs and teaching practices, collection of classroom artifacts of teaching with student work, and the Assessing Secondary Teachers' Mathematical Habits of Mind tool.
Sarah Haavind
Kirstin Milks
Rosio Bugarin Pedroso
Principal
Hi MIST team! This program is so exciting. I can't wait to see your data. Daniel, you mentioned that you are analyzing recordings of teacher work groups recorded during the pd. I am curious to know what data you collected from teacher outside of the pd.
Thanks!
Kimberly Elliott
Daniel Heck
Vice President
Hello, Rosio, thanks for joining us!
In our main study, teacher participants were assigned to one of two cohorts to engage with a MIST course in either 2018-19 or 2019-20. All of them provided data in Fall 2018, Spring 2019, and Spring 2020.
They completed:
1. the Assessing Secondary Teachers Mathematical Habits of Mind instrument (http://mhomresearch.edc.org/)
2. a Classroom Artifact Package, which was adapted from the observation approach of the Instructional Quality Assessment to make use of a subset of that tool's rubrics (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kKEhaQ5mOucDjW...)
3. A survey about beliefs and practices, which included scales primarily from the National Survey of Science and Mathematics + (http://horizon-research.com/NSSME/), the Beliefs about Mathematics and Teaching instrument (Stipek, D. J., Givvin, K. B., Salmon, J. M., & MacGyvers, V. L. (2001). Teachers’ beliefs and practices related to mathematics instruction. Teaching and teacher education, 17(2), 213-226.), and the Comparing Options in Secondary Mathematics: Investigating Curriculum (COSMIC) study.
Kimberly Elliott
Kirstin Milks
Jonee Wilson
Wow, this seems like a really cool (and inexpensive) way to connect teachers and promote a continued love for learning math! Beyond creating/doing interesting problems that students may enjoy, what are some of the other concrete ways that participating in this program could support teachers in improving their instruction? More specifically, what do teacher participants report in terms of changes in their instruction?
Matt McLeod
Project Director
Hi, great question. As part of the sessions and through asynchronous discussion board postings, we try to foster reflection on how this could translate to their instruction. What we try to promote for facilitation lends itself to constructivist learning and we work to make this evident to the participants. Anecdotally, we hear teachers get excited when they realize they have understood a concept without being shown how to do it, and they also report that they have stronger empathy for their students. So, without saying "this is the way you should teach" we try to offer them an experience in facilitated learning and have them explicitly reflect on the benefits of that. We, of course, get some of the drawbacks, such as the amount of time and prep that it takes, but we try to talk through that as well. Finally, we discuss the structure of the problem sets we use. These are designed in a way that asks for participants to do some calculations and step back to look at what we have asked them to do and to make connections. This is a way of working, aka a habit of mind, that we think is really a powerful tool in doing mathematics and learning new ideas. Hope this helps, but please keep asking if not.
Kirstin Milks
Matt McLeod
Project Director
Hi again! You might have noticed Dr. Wilson's post about reflecting on the process and having the experience of PD change your instruction. What professional development have you experienced that had a significant impact on your instruction and what were the characteristics of that PD that caused that impact?
Kirstin Milks
Science Teacher
Hi MIST team - just circling back to thank you for this video! Again, it opened up new ideas for me about connecting teams for a networked-but-local professional development model where teachers work through facilitated lessons -- so cool. :)
Daniel Heck
Vice President
Pleased you found our work useful, Kristin. When we started MIST, we began with some basic orientation for our site leaders and participants about using videoconferencing tools. There is no doubt that teachers won't need that orientation any longer! Surely teachers' familiarity and comfort with remote learning tools and formats provides new opportunities for supporting teacher professional learning. We're probably all going to welcome fewer videoconferences and less remote instruction soon, but we should also be thinking about how to make the best uses of these now familiar contexts going forward.
Matt McLeod
Project Director
Thanks everyone for the great comments and questions. We are very appreciative!
As Dan mentioned and as Kirstin is considering, we developed this remote learning opportunity in the vein of mitigating the need to travel and spend a large chunk of time away from home, both of which meant some people couldn't participate. Now that so many of us in education have much deeper experience with remote learning, we have learned a great deal, some of which we will carry back into the classroom. How are you making lemonade out of this past year? What are some of the positive aspects of your instruction and your realizations about students that you will carry forward into the coming year whether you are in the classroom or teaching remotely?