We need to sit back and not let the weight of history determine what we’re teaching. The weight of history plays too much of a role in these courses, more than our own best professional judgment, learning sciences, or the needs of the workforce.Last week, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning hosted a webinar about the foundation’s work on Statway and Quantway, two new pathways to help take developmental math students “to and through” transferrable college math in one year. Uri Treisman kicked off the webinar:
--Uri Treisman
Uri Treisman - What's the Problem? from Statway on Vimeo.
The structure of the Carnegie design approach emphasizes the importance of networks that can lift up local innovation and expertise, expand thinking to the systems level, and allow for sharing and building on the ideas of others.
Treisman says, “For the first time in a long time faculty are being asked to innovate, they’re being asked to create new solutions for developmental education, but they’re being asked to do it with what they have in their desk drawers. It is time to actually start using modern improvement science, to give people tools respectfully, so they can learn from each other and work from each other and not everyone has to work in a fog of collective amnesia.”
If we are going to shake off the weight of history and emerge from our collective amnesia, building connections between efforts like Statway and Quantway, DEI, and the desk drawer innovators at other colleges is a must. So, here are a few questions to start the conversation:
- If your college is participating in both DEI and Statway or Quantway, how is your institution linking the initiatives?
- If you’re at a Statway or Quantway college, but not participating in DEI, what’s the most important thing you think the DEI network should know?
- If you’re reimagining developmental education with the tools in your desk drawer, Statway or DEI be damned, what are we missing that we need to know about? There’s a comment section below with plenty of room for your answers!
Abby Parcell is MDC's Program Manager for the Developmental Education Initiative.
Two other sources for information and/or guidance consistent with statway & quantway:
ReplyDeletehttp://dm-live.wikispaces.com/
Online community for AMATYC's New Life project (which shares much genetic material with Statway and Quantway).
http://www.devmathrevival.net/
Blog by Jack Rotman, involved with both New Life and the Statway & Quantway work.
Our college is participating in Statway, and right now, the connections between the new initiatives are not explicit but implicit. Through DEI, we have structured our work so that faculty from all disciplines have met for deep conversations and workshops on the intersections of our work. As we move forward, these conversations will continue and inform the direction of our work. Our interdisciplinary workshops have led to innovation in our approaches in teaching reading, writing, and math. The most significant progress has been made in math. As an example, math faculty, college-wide, developed a rubric, tied to benchmarks, for teaching and assessing reading in mathematics. They have also developed lessons for teaching students to read word problems. Our reading and writing faculty have made progress, but they still are working towards including math content in their courses. I am sure other reading and writing faculty across the country have this same problem: math anxiety.
ReplyDeleteAt the ATD Strategy Institute, I had the opportunity to attend the Statway and Quantway meeting; at the end, Uri Treisman and I had a conversation about the importance of reading and vocabulary in mathematics. Studies have shown that a student’s reading level is huge predictor of student success in college, yet we have not comprehensively tried to address ways to infuse reading strategies in math and writing as well. Reading and writing teachers have to meet with math instructors to find the intersections in our curricula where we can reinforce quantitative literacy and literacy in general. Reading and writing can be the levers for helping students to be successful in math. Once our students graduate they are not going to be experiencing math, reading, and writing separately.
“The fog of collective amnesia” is an interesting way to describe what happens when we become complacent, or when we feel certain barriers cannot be removed. A good example is the restraints imposed by the Carnegie credit system which is the biggest anachronism in our educational system. Financial aid, course structures, funding, tuition, faculty loads, and student schedules are all tied to this system and preclude innovation, or, at the very least, make it extremely difficult. So while we have pockets of innovation circumventing this system, we have not made major policy changes affecting the structure of college.
Another example, of a different type, is what I will call the fetish for change. Change for the sake of change is nothing more than window dressing. Often it is initiated in that “fog of collective amnesia.” We try something that has been tried and has not been successful. And we try it the same way. A project has to have research and theory informing it, and principles for guiding it. Statway is an example of change that has research and theory informing it, and principles guiding it. We need to keep this in mind whenever we propose changes.
Our greatest tool in our desk drawers is to pull it out so it forces us to move, get up, and talk. Our college has changed because we have conversations, we talk, we meet, and we debate before we ever make changes that will affect students. Some say we do this ad nauseum, but we take an antiemetic and schedule another meeting.