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Universityof Alabama, Tuscaloosa – Progress Report

Activities and Progress

  1. Develop materials for three courses for prospective elementary school teachers (we are not using any textbooks): The Number and Operations course has been taught Fall 2003, Spring and Summer 2004. By the end of this semester we should have this course in good shape, with a solid core of materials. However, this core will need to be expanded to provide more activities and choices. The Geometry and Measurement course has been taught Spring and Summer 2004. This course will take a couple more semesters to “get right” as we adjust to the lack of background of our students. There are parts of this course that work well and provide a beginning core of materials. The Data Analysis course has not been offered yet (but will be Spring 2005). However, funded by an Alabama State Dept. of Education grant, we offered a similar course to in-service teachers. We will build on this experience (which was quite successful). PMET funds: only a limited amount of supply funds will be used.
  2. Ensure course contents are appropriate and meet the needs: (a) Aside from our ongoing collaboration between the Department of Mathematics and the School of Education, the main component of the grant involved hereis the consultation with a local third grade teacher (Lydia White). We met three times with Lydia during Spring 2004 semester. Lydia participated inour Spring workshop (see 3 below), sharing her perspective with the participants. She also participated in four class sessions during the summer school offering. She shared with the students aspects of the activities that would be relevant for third grade (for example, confirming that students do invent strategies),how the learning experience and learning environment of the course relates to how elementary school children learn (for example, learning from each other in groups), and how understanding content will help them as teachers to design learning experiences for students (she shared that as teachers they will be expected to do this and not just assign problems from a book and how she had difficulty with this due to lack of background). PMET funds: We have not as yet used PMET funds for this but will be using some for Fall semester. We used some consultant funds from our Alabama State Dept. of Education grant. (Since the PMET grant was much less than expected, we needed to do some rethinking of support available to us.)(b) Another component of assuring appropriateness is the use of manipulatives and dynamic software and the consultation of good elementary school curricula. With an internal grant from the College of Arts and Sciences, we purchased many manipulatives for the Numbers and Operations and Geometry and Measurement course. (These are used throughout the courses.) We already had a site-license for Geometer's Sketchpad. (Geometer's Sketchpad is used in the Geometry and Measurement course to explore properties of quadrilaterals and to explore rigid transformations.) With funds from the Alabama State Department of Education grant we purchased a site-license for Fathom and purchased Investigations curricula. PMET funds: We have a line item in the mini-grant budget for materials and supplies. We were able to reduce this from our original request because of the availability of other funds. We will use the remaining PMET funds for further purchases. (c) Dr. Laurie will be attending the PME-NA (Psychology of Mathematics Educators – North America) conference in October. Networking with colleagues will provide perspective and new ideas. In addition, one of the Working Groups for this year's conference is on Geometry and Technology, which will be directly relevant. PMET funds: PMET mini-grant funds will be used for air-fare. In addition, Dr. Laurie will use some of her departmental travel funds.
  3. Engaging other faculty: There are two components of this goal to report on. (a) Workshops: The main purpose of the workshops is to have a dialogue among math faculty and math educators about courses for pre-service elementary school teachers. (One goal here is to get departmental buy-in to what we are doing as well as to help ensure that the courses are mathematically sound.) We held a workshop in Spring 2004 on a Saturday from 9 a. m. – 3 p. m. We had great response; twenty-three (23) people participated – 17 faculty/instructors/graduate students from the Dept. of Mathematics, 3 faculty from local community collegeand nearby university, 2 faculty members from the School of Education, and 1 elementary school teacher. We had a demonstration class with 8 student volunteers. We plan a Fall workshop for October 9 with a similar format but covering other topics related to elementary education. (We received several suggestions from participants in the Spring workshop.) We plan to have more participation from the School of Education and in-service teachers. (We plan to invite some of the teachers who took the Data Analysis course we offered for the Alabama State Department of Education grant.) PMET funds: We did not use mini-grant funds for the Spring 2004 workshop because we had funds (from PMET) to do this workshop based on Dr. Laurie's and Dr. Hsia's participation in a PMET summer workshop. We will be using mini-grant funds for the Fall workshop. (b) We have recruited two Math department faculty members, Dr. Dixon and Dr. Moore, to become involved in teaching these newly designed courses. Dr. Dixon will be teaching the Number and Operations course for the first time this Fall. He has observed several classes during the summer session as well as participated in several conversations with us. Dr. Laurie will be teaching another section of the course and will be coordinating and mentoring. Dr. Moore has agreed to teach the Number and Operations course for the first time in Spring 2005. He will be observing several classes during the Fall semester. PMET funds: Each of these faculty members will receive an incentive of $1000 from the grant.