MATC Synthesis Paper: Becoming A Force for Change Gough 1

Becoming A Force for Change

MATC Synthesis Paper

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the

Master of Arts Degree in Curriculum and Teaching

Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University

Courtney Gough

PID: A43819951

June 15, 2018

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How do we, as teachers, achieve a classroom environment that engages and intrigues students

that also prepares them to be well-rounded citizens who are ready to enter the fight toward an

equitable society? More specifically, how can we make math curriculum interesting, real, and

relatable to students’ everyday lives in a meaningful way? I have observed time and time again,

both in tasks created by myself and throughout textbooks, the presentation of “real-world”

problems that are supposed to engage students. For instance, Dan owns a grass company which

charges a flat fee of $30 plus $80 per acre for lawn mowing, write a function to represent the

total cost for mowing an a acre lawn, or it costs $3 for a Coke and $5 for a piece of pizza, you

spent $50, how many of each did you buy? Do these types of problems sometimes catch

student’s attention? Yes. However, do they really create a meaningful analytical space for

students? Are they accessible to every student and do they challenge students of varying

proficiencies? My response to all of these questions would be a definite no.

My decision to enter the MATC program came in response to the issues stated above. I had spent

a lot of my time working to make math relatable and real world for my students but had still been

falling short. As a new teacher, I realized my lack of content knowledge, as it refers to teaching,

very quickly. I was struggling to design meaningful, authentic mathematics tasks for students,

handling the misconceptions that arose, differentiating to best meet the needs of every student in

my inclusion classroom, and making connections to students’ previously learned math

knowledge.

I entered my first year of teaching as an eager, excited, bright-eyed young woman, ready to

transform my math curriculum to better engage and challenge my students. Particularly, with an
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interest in teaching mathematics for social justice, complex instruction, and equity. However,

when it came down to it, I realized I needed more education and supports in order to reach my

goals. I quickly recognized tailoring my instruction to my diverse set of learners and amending

tasks provided in the old textbooks supplied to me by my school were going to be challenges I

needed to step up to. The MATC program has given me resources, a network, and increased

knowledge in order to best serve each of my students and effectively participate in a school

setting to advocate for change and data-based practices.

Collaboration and Reflection

My time in the MATC program has taught me many valuable lessons in the roles of

collaboration and reflection in the teaching profession. Teaching is a dynamic, ever-changing

profession that requires professionals working together to analyze and reflect upon their own

practices for constant improvement to occur. In my TE 807 class, I was required to analyze an

artifact from a previous activity I had implemented during my intern year and examine how it

was a demonstration of high quality teaching, as shown in artifact 1. This particular activity was

a group project I had designed as a way to introduce key features of polynomials and make

connections across representations (graphs, tables, situations, etc.). In order to make the content

more engaging and relevant to students’ lives, the context used was disparities in educational

financing as it was implemented in the high school’s last year before closing due to budget cuts

and enrollment issues. It addressed something all of my students had on their minds and gave

them a means to make sense of the issue using mathematics. The process of reflection I engaged

with around this activity in TE 807 aligns with standards 2, 3, and 4 as I was required to look

back at something I had created, evaluate its effectiveness, and reflect upon how it could be
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made better. It clearly demonstrates my ability to design curriculum and be reflective about this

curriculum in order to improve differentiation for my students. Specifically, I reflected upon how

to better differentiate and incorporate technology into this lesson. For example, using Desmos

(an online graphing platform) to give visual learners an immediate entry point and having

excelling students engage in peer tutoring across groups. These amendments to my lessons got

me thinking further about other lessons I was enacting and how I could better differentiate those

to encourage participation of students of multiple mathematics proficiencies and backgrounds.

Another component to the TE 807 reflection project was to engage in a peer- to- peer coaching

cycle situated around our artifacts. We met virtually and discussed each other’s work, afterwards

writing up a reflection on the whole process and how we, ourselves, could improve as coaches,

as demonstrated by artifact 2. My work in utilizing a protocol to become a critical friend for a

colleague thoroughly represents my progress toward standard 6. This was the first time I was

asked to reflect upon my work both as a coach and about a reflection cycle in general. Through

this process, I was given the space to think thoroughly about the use of protocols when it comes

to collaborating with colleagues and how to better improve my use of them to add value to the

conversation, a skill that is invaluable when it comes to my work as a teacher.

Differentiation and Equity

A key point of interest for me that developed over the course of the program was how to

differentiate my instruction in order to ensure both access and challenge to every student in my

classroom. As I teach at a full-inclusion school, this is a large problem of practice for me. In

addition, I have always been extremely dedicated to and interested equity as it pertains to overall
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schooling as well as how it pertains to the mathematics classroom. Throughout the MATC

program, I was able to engage in multiple activities that not only gave me the space to clarify my

thinking when it comes to forming an equitable learning community, but also plan and enact my

own research surrounding my particular problems of practice. More specifically, I completed a

detailed, persuasive letter advocating for cooperative learning in the mathematics classroom and

engaged in two major research projects in which I was able to take a deeper look into my

classroom. The research studies I conducted taught me how to design, implement, and evaluate

data in order to draw conclusions. In addition, through these research projects, I have learned that

inquiry cycles often lead us to new questions to investigate to continue improving our teaching

practices. Collectively, these projects have helped me form a clear vision of what I want my

classroom to look like, how to advocate for it, how it fits in with current education research, and

how to conduct research in my classroom.

In TE 823, Learning Communities and Equity, as a part of my socio-cultural concentration, I was

pushed to think deeper about what classroom community I was creating, what my ideal

classroom community looked like, and how I would bridge the gap between the two. In doing so,

I dove deeper into classroom norms, procedures, and structures with a focus on interpretations of

failure, challenges in creating a classroom community, and the overall learning community of a

school. This lead me to a concluding post where I addressed the math department and teacher

leaders at my school regarding the importance of cooperative learning in the mathematics

classroom, demonstrating my progress toward program standards 1, 2, 3 and 5 by artifact 3. In

this artifact, I describe the importance of transforming math-education to be more problem-

solving based, where students are taught the value of working in teams as well as how to work in
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teams. I also address the issues of tracking and the importance of high-quality math tasks that

appeal to and are appropriate for students’ multiple mathematical knowledge bases. While this

concluding post situated my thoughts on forming an equitable mathematics classroom

community in current research and literature, I quickly realized the challenges I would face in

forming this community and the work it would take to get there.

After clarifying a clear vision of what my ideal classroom community would look like and how

to advocate for it, my work in TE 823 lead me to some more specific questions. In TE 861, I was

able to engage in action research surrounding the question: How does the use of high cognitive

demand tasks that are accessible to students with multiple mathematical backgrounds and

proficiencies (low floor high ceiling) affect engagement, and consequently learning, in class? As

demonstrated by artifact 4. Action research, by its definition, “has as its purposes to improve

one’s practice and to develop knowledge and understanding of one’s practice that can be

shared with others” (Capobianco & Feldman, 2006). Through the creation of my action research

proposal and the collaborative opportunities to revise my proposal, I have gained valuable

knowledge on how to implement successful research within my own classroom and a means for

sharing that information, demonstrating my progress towards goals 1 and 3. In addition, as this

proposal was geared toward instruction and differentiation, it also aided me in progressing

toward standards 1, 2, 3, and 4 as I took a deeper look into high cognitive demand tasks, low

floor high ceiling tasks, and how to appeal to each students MMKB (multiple mathematics

knowledge bases). Moreover, engaging in an action research proposal taught me about

different data collection methods and ways to evaluate said data, a skill I was quite weak in

before. To be specific, I learned about the value of triangulating data, coding schemes, and
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using t-tests. These are all skills that I will utilize when doing action research in my classroom in

the future. Overall, my work in creating an action research proposal has taught me the value of

stepping back and taking a very close look into a problem of practice to get down to the root of

the issue. As teachers, this is a constant cycle and a necessary tool as everyone’s classroom is

different and will respond to different interventions. A process such as action research provides

a valuable framework for engaging in inquiry in our classrooms.

In TE 857 I was given the opportunity to engage in lesson study with a group of colleagues to

further investigate this problem of practice, as demonstrated by artifact 5. Through this process,

we were required to create a groupworthy task we believed to be high cognitive demand,

develop our own research questions, and develop data collection tools and strategies to reflect

upon on research questions. This study was my first time collaborating and enacting a lesson I

had developed with a group of colleagues since my internship year. As we worked together to

critique the task I had chosen to teach for our lesson study, my group members helped me

think of multiple strategies to make it more accessible and to hold students accountable.

Among these strategies were assigning each group member a different color to write in as a

means to quickly check participation, providing a manipulative (in the form of a candy box and

some candies for this project), and having an extra help slip for students who were struggling

and could not find a way to enter the problem. These strategies were all things I had not

thought of and without a doubt, improved and made me reflect further upon this and future

lessons.
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Overall, engaging in lesson study, action research, and discussion of how current research fits in

with classroom practices throughout the MATC program has shown me how powerful

collaboration can be when considering differential strategies. To appropriately challenge every

student in a math classroom of students of varying proficiencies once seemed an impossible

feat. However after the insights I have gained throughout the program and with the help of my

colleagues, I am confident in my ability to successfully design and engage in lesson study and

action research in order to gain more insight into my classroom and help other teachers do the

same.

Designing Curriculum

Throughout the course of the program, I had multiple opportunities to think more deeply about

what it means to be a mathematician and how to establish a conducive classroom environment

for all students to learn. The MATC program helped me gain valuable content knowledge needed

for teaching mathematics through multiple opportunities to examine different solution paths to

problems and redesign tasks to better engage students. Most notably, throughout my

concentration courses (both mathematics and socio-cultural perspectives) I dove deeper into

classroom norms, problem solving, and task-creation.

In TE 855, I was given the task of responding to a call for manuscripts for NCTMs journal,

Mathematics Teacher. This call was labeled: Mathematicing the World; An Invitation to

Modeling. It asked for teachers to talk about how the process of modeling unfolded in their

classrooms, how to assess modeling, and how modeling spans the grades. As shown in artifact 6,

I chose to write about the meaning of modeling with math, the progression across the grades, the

importance of it, and gave a geometry example. This project gave me the opportunity to really
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think deeply about what it means to model with math, standard for math practice #6, as well as

dive deeper into all of the other standards for math practice as they are all so intertwined. Writing

this piece required me to reflect upon my practice and lead me to creating a new modeling task,

as shown in artifact 6. This work helped me make progress towards goals 2 and 3 as well as

standards 2, 3, and 4 as I was not only taking a critical look at how the standards for math

practice were playing out in my own classroom, but also digging through research and other

sources to write a piece for submission to a national mathematics teacher journal. Overall, the

task of writing a piece for a journal in my field made me extremely excited about sharing my

knowledge around modeling and lead me to having discussions with my colleagues surrounding

how we were using the practices in our own classrooms.

After completing my journal on modeling with mathematics, I was given another opportunity to

think about how I would incorporate this into my mathematics classroom in TE 857. Artifact 7

consists of a before and after task analyzation and adaptation I created as a part of the course.

This assignment required me to pick a task that I thought was not quite living up to its potential

yet. I then had to analyze it’s connections to students’ mathematical and real-world knowledge

bases, it’s cognitive demand, group worthiness, and consideration of it being a “problem that

mattered” to students. As such, I chose to adapt a volume problem that simply required students

to find the volume of some candy into a project centered around a Hershey’s Lawsuit regarding a

dispute about the amount of slack-fill they were including their Whoppers and Reeses Pieces

Boxes. This project required students to become a team of engineers and work backwards to

design a new box for Hershey’s, ultimately creating a sales pitch that utilized mathematics to sell

their product.
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This task analyzation and adaptation has given me multiple skills that I use on a daily-basis in

my classroom. I now have a list of things to keep in mind when evaluating a potential task for

my classroom. As stated by Berry (2004), “Teachers need to understand their students' interests

and background”. In order to improve our students problem solving abilities, we must carefully

analyze the tasks we are using and consider how they fit in with our student mathematical

backgrounds, as well as their real-life backgrounds. We must consider how each task builds on

their previous knowledge and that the task is accessible and appropriately challenging for each

student.

A Network of Support

My MATC experience has provided me an invaluable resource of connections with colleagues

and has emphasized the need to share resources and be in constant communication in order to

better improve your practice. Teaching is a complex endeavor which requires active conversation

and learning with colleagues. In both TE 823, Learning Communities and Equity, and TE 867,

Perspectives in Social Studies: Global Education, I was required to keep a course blog and

comment on the blogs of my colleagues, as demonstrated by artifact 8. This sparked an

immediate interest for me as I quickly realized the value of using a blog to communicate/ clarify

my thinking and how it could contribute to my continued learning. I quickly came across

multiple education blogs and learned more about the community of mathematics teachers across

the web. Blogging has the enormous benefit of having the power to create your own professional

development with an online community of learning. I can simply post a blog about a problem of

practice and spread the word to get other’s takes using platforms such as instagram or twitter and
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the teaching communities that exist on them. In addition, there are a multitude of resources on

educators blogs. Not only is sharing resources a great practice as is, but it also lends itself to a

sort of lesson study in that I am able to reflect and ask further questions about the lesson and

receive feedback from others. Together, as an online community, we can engage in valuable

discourse surrounding lessons to improve them for the betterment of implementation for our

students. As such, I will continue blogging and expanding my network of teachers in the digital

world.

Conclusion

In conclusion, my participation in the Master of Arts in Teaching and Curriculum program at

Michigan State University has given me valuable skills for continued growth as a teacher. I have

learned multiple strategies to create a cooperative classroom community that strives for equity,

challenges every student, and creates mathematically proficient students, ready to bring change

to the world. The program has challenged both my work as a teacher and my thinking around

teaching and has encouraged me to take risks. I now feel fully prepared to help make curriculum

decisions and help lead change when it comes to teacher collaboration and task-design both in

and outside of my school community. We live in a rapidly-changing, digital world which

requires problem-solving and analytical thinking more than ever and our curriculum must

address these needs.

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References

Capobianco, B. & Feldman A. (2006) Promoting quality for teacher action research: lessons
learned from science teachers’ action research, Educational Action Research, 14:4, 497-
512,DOI: 10.1080/09650790600975668

Berry, R. (2004). Spotlight on the principles: The Equity Principle through the voices of African
American male students. Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, 10(2), 100-103