NCTM-AMTE-NCSM-ASSM joint task force on the Common Core

/ Bill McCallum / Leave a comment

I’m on a panel right now where Gladis Kersaint is reporting about a report of the four mathematics teaching organizations in the title. (I cannot resist the temptation to give this initiative the meta-acronym NANA, whose logo should be a big sheepdog shepherding us through the standards.) The report outlines 6 goals:

  1. Clarify the meaning
  2. Support stake holders
  3. Prepare and support PK-16 teachers
  4. Support the development of high quality formative and summative assessments
  5. Promote research
  6. Develop a governing structure

Big question on number 3: what do we need to do now?

  • Assessment examples
  • Capacity building and leadership development (interpreting the standards)
  • Professional development materials (raise awareness, how to change what you are doing now)
  • Dissemination efforts

Long term efforts:

  • tools for teachers
  • tools to help administrators recognize classroom implementation
  • examples of student work
  • think about professional development that is differentiated based on the needs of different teachers (novice, veteran, …)
  • mathematics content courses that can help people understand how the mathematical practices can be implemented in content

AMTE presentation on TEDS-M

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Maria Teresa Tatto from Michigan State University is presenting about the TEDS-M study, an enormous study which looked at teacher countries from Poland to Botswana. It surveyed institutions of teacher education, teacher educators, primary teachers and secondary teachers, for both mathematics knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. They will have some training for teacher educators on accessing the data in September 2011 in Washington D.C., where you will get the database on a memory stick!

Technical manual for the Common Core

/ Bill McCallum / 3 Comments

Jason Zimba is working on a technical manual that will describe higher order structures in the Common Core standards, such as flows, streams, and ties. Here is an example of what is meant by a flow. What I like about this diagram is that it illustrates the way mathematical ideas are unified as the subject progresses. For example, the disparate ideas of whole number, fraction, decimal, integer, and rational number are unified in an understanding of the number system. Mathematics doesn’t branch out and get more complicated, it collates and compacts ideas into more powerful and denser ideas.

What is the right sort of testing?

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Interesting article about testing in the New York times, which argues that the effort of retrieving information helps learning. Marcia Linn’s comment is relevant to the Illustrative Mathematics Project:

“More testing isn’t necessarily better,” said Dr. Linn, who said her work with California school districts had found that asking students to explain what they did in a science experiment rather than having them simply conduct the hands-on experiment — a version of retrieval practice testing — was beneficial. “Some tests are just not learning opportunities. We need a different kind of testing than we currently have.”