Hello and welcome!

We are very excited to share our work and hear your thoughts about it. As you will learn (or have learned) from the video, MIST is about engaging teachers in doing mathematics for the sake of doing mathematics. It's pretty commonly understood that reading teachers read for fun, but math teachers don't often get to do mathematics beyond their curriculum, so we are offering that opportunity.

We look forward to hearing your comments and your questions. Maybe for starters, please tell us about any experiences you have had in professional development or otherwise to engage in mathematics that you found particularly fun and why you think that experience comes to mind.

I had the great good fortune of being introduced to doing mathematics together as an adult learner in my very first year of teaching. It was a program developing projects for a calculus class.  That was followed soon there after with my own trip to Park City Mathematics Institute where I vividly recall deriving the formula for the area of a triangle on a sphere.  I was introduced to the Mathematical Practices (although not named as such) back in the early 1990s.  I was empowered to explore and create in mathematics rather than just recall and practice. I actively recreated this experience in my teaching practice and now in professional learning opportunities. 

Hi,

What a cool and collaborative project! Thanks for sharing this video so I could learn more about it. 

Can you share more information about the math the teachers are doing and how those tasks are designed? I would also love to hear more about what you are learning about the teachers as they participate in this program. What sorts of outcomes are you seeing from their participation?

Thanks!

Thanks for sharing this interesting work! I am curious about the implementation. Namely, I infer from the video that there is some face-to-face launch and then remote meetings, supported by technology. I'd like to know more about what aspects are in which modality, why and how people are experiencing things.

Thanks!
Susan

Happy Sum Day everyone... 5/14/19. Today is the day you get to do the things the you said you would get to Sum Day.

On that note, here's a little something to get your brain going.

1. Find all pairs of unit fractions (fractions with a 1 in the numerator) that have a sum of 1/2.

2. Find the dimensions of all rectangles whose area has the same numerical value as its perimeter.

3. What's the connection between these two questions?

Although I am not going to answer your Sum Day question right now, I want to write that I appreciate your video's emphasis on educators collaborating by doing and discussing challenging mathematics together within a framework (e.g. the norms) that includes, for example, that it's Ok to not finish problems--actually, if they do finish the problems, it means you (Matt et al.) didn't write them "correctly"! You also wrote above how you're wondering if you will find evidence of shifts in teacher's beliefs about what it means for students to "do mathematics" as a result of their participation in MISTAS. Are you looking for or possibly finding any indications of transfer of some specific parts of your framework or norms (or other aspects of how teachers engage with mathematics together) with teachers into their classrooms? If yes, does anything seem to stand out as a practice that either resonates strongly with participating teachers, seems important for students, and/or has particular promise to broaden participation within their mathematics classrooms? Thanks

Well there goes the rest of my evening!  I will resurface once I have my answers.

Thank you so much for sharing your work. In the past, I've often felt that math (in my formal and professional learning) was something that was done to me rather than something I was a part of. I deeply appreciate setting norms before participants begin exploring mathematics. Great opportunity for teachers.

I'm intrigued with how teachers are using videoconferencing to explore and collaborate. In my own work, we have online tools like Google Classroom. Teachers and leaders sometimes struggle with how to best use online resources to improve collaboration and learning experiences. How are participants taking the online aspects back to their classrooms? What model or framework are you using as it concerns videoconferencing?

Thank you for your question! In this program, we have focused on the video conferencing and other technology as a delivery mechanism for the professional learning, rather than as a mode for sharing ideas in the K-12 classroom. We did find that we needed to adjust the norms specifically to meet the needs of videoconferencing; the initial norms were developed from the face-to-face work done in previous projects (e.g., PCMI Teacher Institute) and did not fully meet our needs. 

First, the groups have to check-in with the instructor every 15 minutes during synchronous meetings. They do this either using a shared spreadsheet or via Slack, depending on instructor preference.

Second, groups are expected to keep an eye on the video of the instructor in case the instructor is trying to get the attention of a group. Sometimes with multiple groups speaking, it can be hard to get the attention of any group without a visual cue.

Finally, we found that it was necessary to volume control the groups over the course of the mathematical work. Both during group work when folks are working together and during videoconferencing share time, we found the instructor needed to be able to control who was louder and who was quieter. In addition, some groups turn their volume down while working on mathematics. In those cases, the group might choose to turn down the volume, but would be looking for the visual cues in the previous norms.

It would be interesting to think further how these norms might support cross-K-12 classroom interactions. Are there other frameworks or guidance that you have found particularly useful?

Hi everyone. What great posts. We love hearing about others' work and we love learning and collaboration. As Miriam mentioned the norms we establish are a crucial part of the collaborative work and it would be great to hear whether any of you use similar norms in your classroom.  How have you used these to help your students understand what it means to be a strong mathematician?

And on another note, to the comment that if you finish all the problems, we haven't written them correctly - the problem sets we use are very carefully crafted with that in mind. We have a few driving principles such as a connected story line or thread that runs through the problems and from one set to the others; low threshold-high ceiling is also important to provide access and engagement for as many as possible; and of course, mathematics is at the core.

What do you look for in problems or programs that you use in the classroom? What are your guiding principles when you develop materials for your students?

Nice work - I love the careful attention to supporting collaborative mathematical inquiry at scale. I'm wondering - does the project have plans to explore how the norms that teachers develop around math investigations within their project groups translate to their work with colleagues locally? I'm curious if one takeaway is that participants develop a set of "tools" to promote productive mathematics conversations with colleagues who may not be a part of the project.