This project focuses on three primary objectives, including: establishing effective professional learning communities, developing a long term plan to enhance mathematics teaching K-16, and closing achievement gaps among diverse student populations. The project accomplishes this via two phases involving a needs assessment during the first phase. For the second phase, the five working groups are designing the research project to address the issues identified during phase one, sharing findings, and communicating across working groups. The intellectual merit of this project lies in the comprehensive and ambitious plan to improve mathematics teaching and learning across the K-16 continuum and beyond. The broader impacts of the work are substantial and address the persistent problems of achievement gaps, of training highly-qualified new teachers and supporting in-service teachers, and of providing appropriate and challenging curricula for all students. The Professional Learning Communities that are being created will have an immediate effect on the teaching and learning of mathematics in both the K-12 school systems in Western Massachusetts and the higher education institutions participating in the Partnership as they build connections among teachers and administrators in many districts and college faculty and serve as a model for other regions. The research project in the second phase of the project will have a longer and substantial impact on mathematics education in western Massachusetts and the nation.
brings together teachers and administrators from ten institutions of higher education and eleven school districts to improve K-12 mathematics education. The districts range from large and urban to small and rural, cover a 50-mile stretch along the Connecticut River, and serve many low-income and minority students in high-needs schools. Collaborators also include the Education Development Center and Five College School Partnership Programs. This project has assessed the needs of the participating districts, carried out innovative professional development activities for teachers and administrators, and developed a strong and vertically integrated partnership. After the initial needs assessment, the WMMP decided to focus on algebraic thinking as a key strand that runs through K-12 mathematics education. It has submitted a new Targeted Partnership proposal to NSF to develop materials to help teachers of upper-elementary and middle school mathematics focus on the role of operations on successively more general sets (whole numbers, integers, rationals, reals, polynomial algebras) as students move from elementary school to high school mathematics. It has also worked on the training of teacher-leaders who can carry out similar training at the elementary level within the participating districts. Another major focus has been on the Common Core Standards of Mathematical Practice, especially those most closely related to algebraic thinking. Finally, it is impacting the ways that students become teachers of mathematics by involving institutions of higher education. The WMMP has created a vigorous and active partnership. Activities have included working groups that assessed and analyzed the needs in mathematics education in the western Massachusetts region; Summer Institutes that combined doing mathematics together, examining student work, and presentations by mathematics education leaders; and vertically-integrated Professional Learning Communities that have been exploring the approach to teaching algebraic thinking. The Partnership has grown beyond the school districts that participated in the original grant proposal and enjoys strong support from the participating districts, which will be partially funding ongoing Professional Learning Communities now that the grant has ended. The WMMP has reached at least 200 K-12 and college educators who report significant changes to their teaching practice and positive responses from their students. Funding from the MSP Start Grant enabled the WMMP to establish itself as an important means of connecting mathematics K-16+ educators across our geographically and culturally diverse region.
