Informing Parents

by Cathy Martin and Alan Olds,
Rocky Mountain Regional Center

IMP teachers in three schools in the Rocky Mountain Mathematics Leadership Collaborative (RMMLC) have worked with their Leadership Teams in unique ways to inform parents about the Interactive Mathematics Program curriculum.

RMMLC is a project funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation to actively support school improvement in mathematics by engaging the support of school leadership teams, composed of an administrator, parent, counselor, and mathematics teacher leaders. IMP teachers and their leadership team members meet for a two-day Leadership Summit each summer to set goals for their work and to create a plan for that work. One facet of that plan is a focus on how to engage the community in becoming well-informed advocates for standardsbased mathematics.

Cokeville High School: Math Fair

After four years of IMP, the leadership team in Cokeville, Wyoming, a small rural community in southwestern Wyoming, wanted to ensure that their community continued to be supportive and informed. The leadership team held a math fair where students showcased their work on POWs. The fair was scheduled to coincide with a school board meeting taking place at the high school that same evening. School board members, parents, and students, had the opportunity to engage in the POWs and to talk with students and teachers about the mathematics.

A variety of mathematical activities were available at the fair. Some IMP 1 students invited attendees to play their POW 7 games (POW 7: Make a Game in The Game of Pig), including one game that featured a one-armed bandit (simulated via a graphing calculator). Other IMP 1 students challenged parents to help Corey the Camel deliver bananas, to solve Around the Horn (simulated by a Sketchpad™ program), or to read The Pit and the Pendulum and view a video of the students’ thirty-foot pendulum experiment. IMP 2 students shared findings on their chi-square study, which addressed the question: “Is there really a difference between students involved in school activities and those that are not with respect to their GPAs?” Other IMP 2 students sought help for the owners of a bakery wanting to maximize their profits given certain business constraints. Year 3 students explained their work in Orchard Hideout and Meadows or Malls? (complete with a three-dimensional model for the More Cookies problem). Year 4 students demonstrated their calculator programming skills including a program that teaches guitar playing!

Parents on the Cokeville leadership team arranged for the donation of prizes and refreshments. IMP teachers Richard Pieper and Bill Thompson declared the evening a success. Richard concluded, “Not only was it a great social event for the community but it allowed the students to showcase one of their strengths in mathematics.”

Adams City High School: IMP
Family Math

Adams City High School in Commerce City, Colorado, is in an urban school district adjoining Denver. With an enrollment of 1400, the school faces the challenges of a highly mobile multi-lingual student population. Through their first three years of implementing IMP, the high school had struggled to engage parents in supporting their children’s work in mathematics. For example, last year’s parent night involved only three parents.

This year, Teresa Haft, the parent representative who attended the summer Leadership Summit, and teacher Joyce Whitney became the catalysts for increasing community involvement. In previous years, Joyce had her students set up their POW 7 games in a lunchtime carnival format where students could play each other’s games. She and Teresa brought the idea of expanding this event to the mathematics leadership team. The team decided to invite elementary and middle school mathematics teachers to join them in planning a family math evening that would highlight the K–12 standards-based mathematics programs in the district.

Their collaboration grew into the IMP Family Math Carnival, financed by the principal, which featured a free chili dinner. IMP students showcased their POW 7 games, and middle and elementary students designed and presented a variety of other mathematics games. Participants received play money to be used to play games. Winnings could be redeemed on hundreds of donated items, and the evening ended with an auction led by IMP teacher Jan Fitzgerald for donated computers and bicycles. Over 450 parents and children attended. In a letter to the leadership team, Superintendent John Lange commended the teachers and team for engaging parents in “taking a serious interest in our math program and becoming more involved in our schools.”

Rangely Schools:
K–12 Family IMP Nights

Parent involvement has been generated in a different way in Rangely, Colorado, a small rural community in the northwestern part of the state, which is implementing standards-based K–12 mathematics. To create a structure for sustaining this work, Rangely’s IMP Leadership Team includes representatives from the middle and elementary schools. This year, K–12 mathematics teachers have joined together to host a series of six family math nights. Each evening is organized around a strand of mathematics. Parents have the opportunity to do activities from this strand at each level so that they can see how the curriculum builds from year to year.

To send the clear message that parents should be aware of all levels of the mathematics curriculum, the Leadership Team meeting in January was held at the elementary school and its focus was on planning an upcoming math night. All elementary teachers, the elementary principal, and middle school and high school mathematics teachers attended the planning session. Before putting the details of the evening together, teachers engaged in a discussion of the “Big Ideas” of geometry and how they build at each grade level.

The January math night, held the following week, focused on geometry. Mel Oliver, a high school IMP teacher, introduced the evening by sharing with parents the teachers’ goals for parents: to observe how we’re teaching mathematics and to get involved in doing the mathematics. Elementary teachers Diana Bissell, Lorraine Oliver, and Patty Williams led parents in activities that examined coordinate geometry and area. Middle school mathematics teacher Glenda Halcomb and a student provided parents with a model for understanding the formula for the area of a circle. Parents also used cubes to build rectangular prisms as they developed a “layering” formula for volume. At the high school level, three IMP students facilitated a mini-lesson for parents on finding a formula for the area of a triangle (Homework 6: The Ins and Outs of Area from Do Bees Build It Best?). IMP teacher Dave Walck encouraged parents to ask their students to justify and communicate the mathematics when working with them at home. Teachers from the three schools encouraged parents to visit classes to see for themselves what students are learning. While parents were doing mathematics in the cafeteria, students in the National Honor Society and the High School Math Club led a night of math fun for younger students in the library.

RMMLC schools all face the challenge of how to support and sustain reform mathematics programs. By working together on a regularly scheduled basis through school leadership teams, mathematics teachers, administrators, counselors, and parents are able to ensure that their school communities continue to be informed about all the good things happening in reform mathematics classrooms.