Hi Gerald! Thanks for your question. We have been excited about having so many CC faculty involved in this project. To answer your first question, we share the results of our work through conference presentations and publications, which is the typical dissemination pathway. Several CC faculty on our project are involved in math ed research organizations, such as SIGMAA on RUME and ICME, as well as AMATYC. However, we also work directly with our school and district administrators in our state to share back with them the progress we are making with our project teachers.

To answer your 2nd question, our hope is that the differences between instructional strategies used by middle school teachers and CC faculty begin to decrease! We want teaching at all levels, including the collegiate level, to be focused on meaning making and problem solving with a focus on building a conceptual understanding. We stress the importance of the CCSS Mathematical Practices, but we also practice what we teach in that we implement these same MPs in our own CC courses.

Interestingly enough, the phrase “AMP philosophy” was coined by several of our own project teachers. Our philosophy — or as I like to think of as our mission — is to get teachers to frame their work on student thinking. To us, this means that we want teachers to plan, implement, and reflect on their teaching based on students’ thinking by anticipating conceptual or procedural misconceptions. We focus quite a bit on MP3: Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others. Inherit in this practice is a high level of student engagement and student discourse. Speaking with meaning is at the center of this discourse where students engage in high-level discourse of their mathematical thinking, not just the process.

Thank you, George. We feel very honored that NSF supported our work, especially since we are at a community college! We just presented at both NCTM and NCSM, and we plan to submit a proposal for NCSM 2017 very soon.

Relative to developmental mathematics courses, it is far too soon to see any direct impacts AMP has had on reducing the need of developmental courses. However, this week we are working with 47 CC faculty to provide AMP-like faculty development for our own faculty as we revised the content of these courses. Quite exciting to be working with our faculty in this larger capacity. We genuinely hope that we see a significant reduction in the number of students needing to complete developmental courses — this would be a wonderful outcome for everyone involved!

Hi Michelle! Our PD involves ~100 hours/year for our teachers. They complete 2 years in our program. The hours are split among institutes/workshop and CCOL (Collaborative Communities of Learners…our version of a PLC). Teachers meet for 1 week in the summer, 4 Saturdays during the academic year, and 30 hours of CCOL. The institutes/workshops focus on content — number sense & operations, geometry & measurement, and problem solving in year 1; stats/probability, proportionality/functions in year 2. The CCOLs meet ~9 times over the year and most meetings occur once a month. The CCOLs are site-based and a majority of them are facilitated by a CC faculty. Instructional rounds occurs each spring semester. All teachers in AMP participate in all of these activities. :) In the end, they invest ~200 hours of PD time with us. This is quite the commitment, but we know that this level of engagement is critical for impacting teaching in profound and productive ways.

Hi Carolina! Thank you…we are definitely proud of the opportunity for us to lead this project. And kudos to NSF for funding us! :)