Research

That Matters

Dear Colleagues:

Last fall, Judy Mitchell, Dean of Washington State University's College of Education, and I convened a group of 26 of the state's superintendents at a conference sponsored by Microsoft. We asked, "If you are to be successful with the children we serve, what would our colleges of education be doing?"

"Helping us with math achievement," they said.

"Training more math teachers."

"Helping us explain the 'math wars' to parents, board members, and our own teachers."

We were already working on these issues — but as a result of that conversation, we stepped up our efforts. School districts face problems almost daily, as newspapers quote parents angered over their children’s low math results on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning. The news stories describe confused students who face conflicting teaching methods from one grade to the next and different curricula as they move from one school to another. They cite business leaders who worry that more American jobs will be outsourced if the next generation can't master critical problem-solving and reasoning skills.

It’s also true that teachers are frustrated. They are being tasked with presenting harder subject matter to an increasingly diverse student population, even as legislative mandates require teachers to bring students — ALL students, including the state’s lowest achievers — up to higher academic standards in mathematics.

Every spring, we receive inquiries about the availability of graduates from our teacher education program. Who, school districts ask, will be graduating in math education? Do the graduates already have job offers? The answer is probably yes — even if it is January and graduation is not until June. Although we are working hard to prepare more teachers in mathematics education, it’s hard to recruit students with strong math backgrounds into teaching and hard to retain them, with the lure of higher-paying jobs in technology, science, engineering, finance — fields in the wired world that thrive on out-ofthe-box mathematical thinking. The applicant pool for math teachers is far too slim to address the state’s needs. To make matters worse, nationally, about a fifth of public high school math teachers lack full certification in their field, especially those in low-income urban schools. Some neither minored nor majored in math. Even veteran certified teachers aren’t receiving adequate professional development to help their students not only master core math concepts and principles, but make sense of them using analytical, logical, and creative problem-solving skills. It is also true that youth in the United States have performed poorly in comparison with their international peers in math. Ironically, international comparisons reveal that students in top-performing countries are often assigned fewer math problems per lesson but explore them more deeply than is typical in U.S. classrooms. How can our K-12 students improve their understanding of math given these circumstances?

The UW College of Education is addressing these issues in its inquiry-based math education program. Our faculty are working to ensure that elementary teachers graduating from our program have a deeper understanding of the math they will be required to teach and that secondary teachers are prepared to help students who excel in math, as well as those who find it difficult. Our faculty are preparing new Ph.D.s to fill the need for more professors in our colleges and universities at the same time that they work with practicing teachers to explore new curricula and instructional methods. Our faculty have analyzed thousands of student-teacher exchanges to see what genuine mathematical understanding looks like, how it can be monitored and assessed. They have gone into workplaces and households to see whether the math taught in schools translates into the daily problem-solving of children and adults.

The faculty moved math methods courses out of classrooms at the university and into local schools. Further, we follow our teacher education students through their student teaching and into their first two years in classrooms so that we can help them negotiate very complex classrooms while they gain critical formative experiences.

Our faculty serve not only those entering the teaching profession, but also currently practicing educators. Based on school and district needs, they have built intensive workshops and developed in-school coaching and collaboration programs to help teachers and principals ensure that their students really understand the math they are expected to know.

These inquiry-based approaches are under intense scrutiny by policymakers and educational administrators. The pressures to improve student achievement have fueled the “math wars” — noisy, heated arguments between math “reformists” and “traditionalists.” As my colleague Mark Windschitl describes the debate, simplistic stereotypes paint the first group as “fuzzy math” advocates, the second as rote-and-drill “control freaks.”

These “math wars” are divisive and counterproductive. It’s time, as my colleagues argue within these pages, to move beyond angry rhetoric, to pose important questions and hold productive discussions that are focused on student learning. Good teaching, UW faculty research shows, is not an either-or, one-size-fits-all matter. In the best math classrooms, teachers adapt a variety of teaching methods to maximize student learning, knowing one child may learn best by listening and memorizing, another by talking and visualizing. These teachers develop in their students a love of mathematics as a system of deeply linked ideas. The teachers pose questions, push engagement, enable students to make critical connections.

Their students know that 12x3=36. And they also know why.

It’s difficult work, and it requires sophisticated teaching skills. Our faculty, along with our WSU colleagues, are working hard to improve math instruction, right along side our school district partners. We believe that together we can be counted on to make a difference.

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