Creating great content is difficult, but so is using that content if I don’t understand the math, the context and the kind of questions I should be asking students to respond to their thinking. Our path will always be determined by our own context, but naming what is necessary and sufficient as a community? That’s what will help us learn to be learners about mathematics in schools.

The concept then of collaborative lesson planning might start to address this need, but only if it is followed with reflective revision. What student thinking was revealed through the task? What student thinking was obscured? Was there mathematics worth discussing that arose from the work (generalizations of patterns, new tools/strategies, etc)?

I appreciate your persistence in working on improving how we engage students and apologize that NCTM did not respond to you. As I indicated in a previous post, NCTM does not recommend that anyone only use NCTM materials. While NCTM does not endorse products, we do provide opportunities for teachers to share, learn about, and discuss methods and resources as part of collective and collaborative professional growth. Under the Math Forum, we are working to increase these opportunities for teachers. Teachers and math educators sharing and discussing methods and resources are the foundation of our journals and our conferences similarly focus on sharing the expertise and work of teachers.

Only use what they promote? They didn’t even have the courtesy to even respond to us…

In short, I actually think we mostly talking about the same thing here… the question is, how do we all get around the same table, to have that conversation? How do we get the path design going?

Whenever I ask a question like this around Desmos, I tend to get the response, “How far would Google Docs get you?” What are you looking for that existing solutions, however clunky, don’t provide?

I’m not entirely clear why I hate doing this on google docs, but I do. I need to do some soul searching to figure out why, I think…

run soulsearch.exe

Docs is the tool that I use, at the moment, to handle this stuff. Geoff’s curriculum maps do a great job of collecting curriculum, and they use docs.

One issue is that docs are clunky to load and to view. I don’t feel as if they are capable of capturing my “vision” for a unit or something. I’m reluctant to link to a google doc from my blog. (Partly because it’s not published. It’s hanging out in a folder. I assume that, at some point, I’ll screw up and delete it by accident, as I’ve done to various important google docs numerous times already.)

Another thing about docs: they aren’t searchable. I know, I know, now we’re getting into Better Lesson territory, but so far Desmos has been handling that problem pretty well with the curated search.

Maybe y’all can let users make Desmos activity bundles and treat those the same way as you treat activities? And, if that goes OK, you can give us a labs experiment where we can include things besides Desmos activities in the bundles? (And then, eventually, ditto with courses???)

The emergence of online communities like the #MTBoS has created challenges for NCTM, particularly on the content production and membership fronts. NCTM past president Linda Gojak said “NCTM is no longer in the standards-writing business”, notably with its 1989-2000 publications. Throughout its history and especially since 2000 NCTM seems to have focused on producing quality peer-reviewed content through its various publications (including P2A recently) and conferences, but less on the connectivity that empowers online communities.

Perhaps the “next big opportunity” for NCTM is in connecting members online around its quality content. NCTM’s average member age is 55 years and fewer teachers are buying memberships, opting instead for free online connectivity with other teachers that is still quite good overall.

A pivot may be in order. NCTM could make its high quality resources more freely available to attract new followers, but offer members an integrated ecosystem built to sustain collaboration, resource modification and implementation of high quality content wherever that content may be found: NCTM, online or elsewhere.

“Paving a new path” indeed.

Because standards and standardized tests were rolled out ahead of aligned commercial or open-source curricula, many districts have chosen to “roll their own” curriculum. Because of the disparities between and among different teacher and learner audiences, most of these efforts result in Frankenstein-monster-style curricula, in which Lesson A is stitched to Unit B and wrapped in language from Curriculum C.These are mashed together by mid-level people who are not curriculum experts in an attempt to create coherence through common printing, binding (or through PDF generation), and legal proclamations.

As a result, we have even less coherence than before.

I appreciate Dan’s perspective about the six-year time cycle for conventional commercial curricula.

In my classroom, *I* am the common element. I am also the one who gets yelled at if students and families have a bad experience due to incoherent curricula. This makes me the de facto editor of bad curricula – regardless of where they come to me from.

For this reason, it feels insane to me to suggest that I *not* be resourceful in the MTBoS in the service of greater coherence for my students. I assure you this is a major pain in my butt, but I am determined to use it as an opportunity to become a clearer and more effective teacher for and with my students.

One last deep thought – I sure am getting tired of being blamed for the incoherence of standards and curricula that are way above my pay grade. Unfortunately, the way all of this has been set up (or *not* set up), everything rolls downhill into my yard.

Grumpily,

– Elizabeth (@cheesemonkeysf)

Better to have tried (something off the beaten path) and “failed” (the lesson-as-taught doesn’t grab the brass ring of high levels of student engagement, participation, and insight/learning/growth) than to never have tried at all (thereby settling for the usual, generally dull and highly-directive activities of most commercially produced textbooks. 

Now, having probably mixed too many metaphors in an attempt to get the cliche to fit, let me suggest that the fundamental issue is never the materials but always the teacher. A teacher who downloads, finds in another book than the official text, pulls from the latest issue of one of NCTM’s teacher journals, or takes from the colleague across the hall a lesson-as-written and mindlessly applies it to his/her own classrooms will generally do no better (and generally worse) than the original implementation/design of said resource. Garbage in, garbage out? Of course, the given lesson may be a good deal above the level of garbage, but it can’t be a magical elixir, either, that miraculously works with every student in every class as taught by any teacher whatsoever. No such animal exists. 

What’s needed is both teachers who have been taught how to interrogate lessons in the light of their particular students, their own strengths and weakness as practitioners of the art and craft of mathematics teaching, and lessons that are offered up with reflection on the various “moves” within the lesson and the components thereof. That is, the person(s) posting these lesson frames need to draw back the curtain on how they came to craft them as they did and why they think doing things in a particular way makes sense, keeping in mind that it’s unlikely that everyone, perhaps not even ANYONE, who is giving the proper reflection to such matters will agree 100%. And so there might well be reason to post “alternative hypotheses and conclusions” about how a lesson might be done, much like we expect from intellectually honest publishers of educational and other social science research. One size does NOT fit all, even if a limited bit of experimenting with one’s own practice suggests that it does. 

Michael:

Is there a way to create bundles of lessons online and easily share those bundles online? I don’t think there is, and I often want to do this.

Whenever I ask a question like this around Desmos, I tend to get the response, “How far would Google Docs get you?” What are you looking for that existing solutions, however clunky, don’t provide?