34
The National Academies
National Research Council
National Science Resources Center
Math/Science Partnerships Workshop
How People Learn
June 29, 2004
Keck Center
500 Fifth Street, N.W.
Room 100
Washington, D.C.
Proceedings By:
CASET Associates, Ltd.
10201 Lee Highway, Suite 160
Fairfax, Virginia 22030
(703) 352-0091
34
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Greeting and Overview of the Day 1
Implications for MSPs 5
34
P R O C E E D I N G S [8:47 a.m.]
Agenda Item: Greeting and Overview of the Day
MR. GEORGE: Good morning. I trust that everyone had a lovely evening and enjoyed Washington. I know some of you went to the World War II Memorial.
PARTICIPANT: And we were not arrested.
MR. GEORGE: I know that. I checked the paper this morning and I was very pleased to see no relevant police reports.
We want to try to wrap things up today. I have asked Jay to put up on the screen both the take-home points you all identified but mostly the questions for today so that we can, I hope, address those, at least in part while you are here.
We will have two parts really—three parts to this morning's activities. In just a few minutes we will go into the breakout groups and they are the same breakout groups as yesterday, except Mike Martinez will take the one instead of Jose, who had to leave late yesterday afternoon. We will continue the discussion on human learning and then higher education with Herb and Bonnie and the K-12 applications with Laura and Rob.
There are different rooms this morning so here is where those groups will be. Mike's group on human learning will be in 104, which is on this side of the building over here. Herb and Bonnie will be in 106, which is also on this side of the hallway and, finally, Laura and Rob will be in 213, which is, again, upstairs, but a different room from where they were yesterday.
So, again, we hope you will go to whichever ones interest you and if you have more than one person from the same place, probably you will want to go different ones. That will take us from roughly now until now until 10:30 in the morning. There will be a break and then there will be a brief 45 minutes for "Jigsaw" Groups or teams or whatever combinations you find yourselves wanting to be in to try to wrap up.
The teams may particularly want to be together, but it should be a sharing of what happened in the different breakout groups. Then we will have—we are very pleased and grateful to Dava Coleman, who is going to talk a little bit specifically with you about implications for MSPs so that we can—our concern really is that you take something home that is useful. The whole point of this is to assist the MSPs do their work. So, we want to be sure we do that as well as we can.
Then Herb and I will lead off with perhaps a few general observations at noon and then there will be a final opportunity for questions or comments from you and then there will be box lunches and we will be out of here by 12:30 at the latest because I know you counted on that for airplanes and things.
So, that is the kind of plan for today and we hope it will be a good kind of bringing together of things. So, are there questions or things you want to raise? Jay, anything you want to add?
MR. LABOV: [Comment off microphone.]
MR. GEORGE: All right. Well, we are a few minutes early, but I don't see any reason to delay. Janet, unless there is something else?
MS GARTON: One more thing. 106 is actually on this side, all the way down on the left.
MR. GEORGE: Okay. So, I lied. I am sorry about that.
All right. Well, then make your way with coffee or whatever you wish to the breakout rooms and we will be back here at—take a break at 10:30 and we will be back here at 10:45.
[Breakout Groups.]
MR. GEORGE: Mike is leaving. So, if anyone wants to say goodbye to Mike, he is waving. Thank you, Mike, very much indeed. Don't forget to send me the—Mike, don't forget to send me that chapter of the book. Okay?
What we are going to do now is to form "Jigsaw" Groups, but we have lost a couple of people and we have decided that you all can figure out how to do this more easily than we can. So, how about if we let the Georgia people—I think you went—some of you went—between you, you went to all three groups. So, you may want to sit together and think Georgia thoughts or whatever it is that Georgians do when they all get together. I still want to hear the state song by the way before you leave.
It may be that—what we want to be sure is that everybody is with a group that includes somebody from all three. So, let me start with this table over here. How many of you—were you in different sessions? And she was in a different session? Okay. So, you are set over here.
Janet, they are way ahead of us. We are totally unnecessary and do you have people from all three groups here? No. Bonnie is joining you. All right. So, we have three groups and we have until 11:30 when Dava will do a kind of wind up application. Okay?
["Jigsaw" Groups.]
MR. GEORGE: We need to move to the next section. I am not going to declare a break, but, obviously, if you have to leave, leave.
We are delighted and very pleased that Dava Coleman has agreed to do a kind of wrap up from the perspective if the field, to try to help us think through again the implications of this for MSPs. So, without further ado, here is one of our wonderful Georgians, Dava Coleman.
Agenda Item: Implications for MSPs
MS. COLEMAN: My name is Dava Coleman. I have really enjoyed getting to know you and I am very honored to be asked to wrap up our session. Just like our MSP, your MSPs are probably grappling with some really complex, very complicated questions. One of the things I want to do today is to leave you with some of those questions that maybe we can keep a dialogue going. We haven't had a lot of opportunity to learn about each other MSPs, but I am going to take a few minutes and talk to you about ours so you know the context in which my remarks are going to be. Okay?
My background is chemistry. I got my degree and then went back and got my teaching certificate when I found out that shooting lipstick samples into a gas chromatograph was very boring work. I did that for awhile and I realized that, you know, I am way too much of a people person to sit in this little—and honestly, guys, my cubicle was like 4 by 4. It was a cell.
So, anyway, I went back and got my teaching certificate and have loved it ever since, although I was one of those people when someone would say what do you plan to do, I would always look at them and go I am never teaching, never, no way. But I did go back and I did do my student teaching and just fell in love with all of it.
I have kind of gone my way, but I did grow up in North Carolina and then ultimately moved to Texas and did some things there before I made my way back to Georgia. But as of last January, I left the classroom to join the Georgia MSP, which we call PRISM, Partnership for Reform in Science and Mathematics. PRISM has been an experience, mainly because of the people that you see over at the table that I get to work with on an ongoing basis. You guys can wave.
PRISM is a state-wide initiative. We have one major goal, which is to improve science and math achievement for all students. That implies all kinds of things, improving the quality of teachers, the quantity of qualified teachers, closing the achievement gap between different ethnic cultures, of which we have a lot in Georgia. Our schools are becoming more diverse as we speak.
We are grappling with, obviously, a new state curriculum, which if you have read the newspaper, we don't believe in evolution, but we really do. We just can't say the word. So, we refer to it as the "E" word. So, we are really grappling with a lot of very important issues and the MSP PRISM could not have been more timely for us because school districts out there are asking and needing the guidance and we are trying to do our best to provide it. We are divided into four regions, though, and each region is basically directed and guided by what we call the regional coordinating committee and that committee is made up of administrators, superintendents, curriculum directors, teachers in math and science, higher ed, math science and math science education.
So, it is just a very broad group of people, who bring to the group a lot of different expertise levels. They really guide our work. We also have a state leadership team of which you see Sheila and Judy and Darcy are part of. Sherry works with me in the Northeast Georgia group and so does Nancy. Northeast Georgia is organized around EGA and all of our regions have at the center a university. With the university, partnering with the university, I should say, are various school districts.
We also partner with RESA and—oh, RESA is Regional Education Service Agencies. Is that right? I haven't thought about what that meant in a long time. That kind of sums up—I don't want to spend a lot of time just on PRISM, but we are very partnership driven. Did I do well? You guys are supposed to cheer.
[Cheering.]
The reason for that is we just finished the mammoth task of our first year one reporting. The budget was very difficult. The reporting was even more so. So, we are really trying to focus on those MSP features.
So, let's talk a little bit about summing up. Do you have any burning questions about PRISM that I could answer quickly before moving on? I don't want to spend a lot of time on it.
MS. WANG-IVERSON: How many districts?
MS. COLEMAN: 15. We have three in Northeast Georgia and the size varies, depending on the size of the districts. One of our regions, which includes the metro Atlanta area just has Atlanta public schools, which is larger than all of our other districts combined. Is that right? That is right, isn't it? Pretty close.
This is just year one start up. We really haven't started counting the number of teachers that are involved in PRISM activities yet. We have different levels of activities. Obviously, we have professional development on a lot of different levels, but we also have the Regional Coordinating Committee, which is a learning community in and of itself. We have lead teachers that are working with teachers in their schools and that forms a different group.
So, we have a lot of direct contact. What our purpose is is to get directly to the students and the teachers and the classroom. So, we spend a lot of time working with the schools, in the schools.
Over the past couple of days we have spent a lot of time talking and learning from one another and to borrow an MSP key feature, we have, I think, become very highly engaged and deeply imbedded. What I would like to do with you guys today is to talk just a little bit about what we have learned and how we can affect with How People Learn and the entire document.
One of the things that I would like you guys to do, if you brought copies of it, is to pull out the little book, if you brought it—and if you didn't, if you guys would share—Nancy, would you hold my copy up? Bridging Research and Practice. Chapter 2 is perfect. If you have not already copied, photocopied Chapter 2 and hung it up in your office over your desk, you need to go do it right now. You need to send it out to everybody who has any influence at all with any of you in math and science.
That is probably my one true recommendation that will keep you focused. The only thing that you need to add to the bottom of that list, though, is this. This is one omission and, Mel, you need to take this concept back to the committee. The one omission is truly that you forgot to include how exhausting learning is because I don't know about you guys, but I am really tired. Too much thinking and too much learning is tiring.
So, add in exhausting to the bottom. Learning is exhausting as one of the other key findings in Chapter 2 because it truly is.
My task actually for the next few minutes is to lead our discussion of implications. In other words, what we are asking ourselves at this point is so what. Patsy has done a really good job of really directing—she was working in my group when we first began on Sunday and she kept saying define that for me, clarify that for me. Ultimately, she got to the point of all right, so what. One of the things that—well, I guess one of the stories I am not really proud of, but it is funny. So, I am going to tell you anyway—is that we were working in a leadership meeting and we were beginning to finalize our year one report and, again, we were talking about the MSP key features and how we could talk to NSF about key features and the work that we were doing.
Jan Kettlewell, who is our PI for the grant, was at the head table and she was just smiling at our conversation and our discussion and finally she just folded—she has this habit of doing this, right, and so she looked at all of us and says so what. Before I could even think about what I was saying, I turned around and I said, yes, I had a professor on my doctoral committee, who always asked me that question and I didn't like him either.
Then I realized, oh, my gosh, what did I just say. Luckily she laughed. Thank goodness. But it is a hard question and you know, a lot of times we spend so much time running around doing things that we forget to ask ourselves are the activities that we are engaged in really connecting with the goals that we have for our projects.
So, if I could have the first slide—Jay, I am sorry. I didn't give you forewarning—I would like for you guys to take a minute and think, No. 1, what is the major goal of your MSP. Just get that fixed in your mind. What is your major goal?