GeT Support: An online professional learning community to support the geometry course for teachers

Regents Of The University Of Michigan - Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor MI

Investigators

Abstract

This project seeks to provide a mechanism and resources for improving the alignment of the Geometry for Teachers (GeT) course with the mathematical knowledge needed for the teaching of high school geometry, as well as for meeting the demands of the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics. Although teacher certification in most states requires that teachers have a course in Euclidean geometry, because Euclidean geometry is no longer an area of active mathematical research, mathematicians tend to be less invested in this course. Yet, the teaching and learning of geometry is still vital in high school to induct students into mathematical reasoning. This project will develop and implement a system of professional support for the improvement of the GeT course that mathematics departments teach to pre-service secondary teachers. This project will convene a network of 24 college instructors and 8 high school geometry teachers to create an inter-institutional system of professional support anchored in an online platform and a set of common resources. The project will develop a professional learning community that will use and draw information from an existing assessment instrument, and that will use the resources of an online platform to share and interact about resources for the course. The project will generate information that describes how geometry courses for teachers contribute in preparing future teachers to teach geometry in high school and documents the association between participation in the professional development and students' gains in mathematical knowledge for teaching geometry. The project will contribute improvements to the assessment of mathematical knowledge for teaching geometry that enable instructors to use this assessment for diagnostic and formative purposes. The project team will study the assessment results, and examine the interactions among instructors and materials with the goal of documenting the difficulties that instructors experience and using an iterative process to address identified challenges. This project will engage mathematics faculty and high school geometry teachers in a range of online forums destined to connect MKT-G (mathematical knowledge for teaching geometry) with the GeT course. To gather diagnostic and formative feedback for these activities, faculty teaching GeT will administer MKT-G assessments to their undergraduate students and answer a survey of curriculum and instruction practices every year. Participants will be involved in online forums in which they will examine the work high school students do in geometry, examine how pre-service teachers solve MKT-G problems, and discuss issues of course conceptualization, curriculum development, and pedagogy. The project staff will examine changes over time in MKT-G scores and on instructional practices, as well as distill from the online discussions observations about the rationality that GeT instructors involve in their work. This will allow the project to provide recommendations for improving the alignment between the high school geometry course and the GeT course. In doing so, the project will contribute to the institutional support of the GeT course in ways that no single mathematics department can, given the limited presence of the courses in most university mathematics departments. The proposed system of professional support for college geometry instructors will collect artifacts, house discussions, and create resources for assessment and instruction that will be usable beyond the group of participants. The resources will be open to all geometry instructors in Year 5 of the project and beyond. The archived discussions will be a rich resource for use by college geometry instructors long term. The project will increase mutual awareness between instructors of the geometry course for teachers and teachers of the high school geometry course--the nature of the activities proposed broaden the scope of work of both groups of individuals. The project is supported by the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) Program and the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship program of the Division of Undergraduate Education in the Directorate of Education and Human Resources.