Over the past few weeks, the SAS Loves Math series has showcased just a few of the math aficionados at SAS and how they use math in their jobs, from software development to text analytics. But for this installment of SAS Loves Math, I want to spotlight another distinct group of individuals who have chosen careers in math: teachers.
Last week, SAS hosted the annual Triangle High Five Math Summit. Hundreds of middle and high school math teachers from the Triangle area attended the two day conference, participating in interactive sessions and listening to speakers such as Jere Confrey, a distinguished mathematics education professor at NC State University, and Jim Goodnight, founder and CEO of SAS and stalwart advocate of STEM education. In addition to hosting the summit, SAS provided complimentary staff and catering for the event. Now that’s commitment to math education!
The main focus of the conference was on the new Common Core State Standards initiative, a revised and standardized set of guidelines as to what skills American students should be learning in school. This year marks the first year of widespread implementation, though most states, including North Carolina, have been adopting the standards gradually over the past two years. Many of the teachers I spoke to were excited and optimistic about the Common Core despite the changes they will have to make to their teaching style.
On the second day of the conference, I attended a session for sixth and seventh grade math teachers called “How to Get Students to Connect the Big Ideas,” led by Holt Wilson and Allison McCullough, assistant professors of math education at UNC Greensboro and NC State University, respectively. As its name suggests, the session was all about the big ideas of the Common Core and how teachers could effectively implement them in their classrooms.
To kick off the session, Wilson and McCullough had the teachers in attendance complete a simple algebra problem: finding the area of a tiled border around a pool. Though it didn’t take long for everyone to arrive at the correct answer, the two presenters pointed out that most of the teachers had solved the problem using differing methods. Then, the teachers were given a list of student solutions to the same problem. Each answer had been reached a different way, and many of the answers were incorrect. Wilson and McCullough asked the teachers to explain the probable reasoning of each student, then to try to determine where the students went wrong.
The teachers eventually realized that though the answers may not have been right, the logic behind each of the solutions—all of the students’ responses had components that were correct, and many of the students had even thought considerably outside of the box. This is one of the tenets of the Common Core: though math is conventionally viewed as a subject of rigid right and wrong answers, the most important skill for students to learn is how to work through a problem logically. While finding the right answer is still important, there are always multiple ways of thinking through the problem and arriving at that answer.
In addition to demonstrating that key component of the Common Core, the style of the session itself seemed to stem from the initiative. Wilson and McCullough gave the teachers broad problems that encompassed many skills at once, from the order of operations to basic algebra. They also asked teachers to collaborate in small groups and to explain their reasoning, allowing for discussion and clarification. In this way, the goal of the session was twofold: to show the teachers some of the goals of the Common Core and to demonstrate to them what a Common Core classroom could look like.
Although I have absolutely no experience as a math educator, I found the session to be informative, engaging, and fun, and I could tell it was a hit with the teachers. Wilson and McCullough did a superb job with the session I attended, and the other teachers I spoke to sang praises of the other sessions and presenters as well. It definitely seems like an exciting time to be a math teacher, and SAS is very proud to support math teachers and STEM education by hosting the summit.
If you’d like to learn more about the Common Core and what it means for teachers, check out this article by Caroline McCullen or visit the Common Core State Standards website. And don’t forget to read the next installment of the SAS Loves Math series later this week!
