Midwest Regional Center

Spring 2004

In 2000, Minneapolis was funded under NSF’s Urban Systemic Program, which provides some funds to support professional development in mathematics and science. Soon after, Minneapolis received a grant from the McKnight Foundation to support the reform of high schools into Small Learning Communities. These are some of the areas we pursued to increase the level of professional conversations about mathematics:

• The math coordinator initiated monthly meetings with high school math representatives in 2002.
• A small committee of teachers who had successful teaching experience with both IMP and traditional courses collaborated to write and design a brochure to describe the high school curriculum choices for eighth-grade students and their parents.
• Two district-wide staff development days per year were focused on instructional strategies, including behavior management issues and approaches to working with ELL students.
• A working group of IMP- and traditional-course teachers worked last fall to place the new state standards into the math course sequence.

Spring 2003

Changes in district leadership, curriculum leadership, and high school reorganization have made it difficult for Minneapolis IMP teachers to get together on a regular basis. At a rare but welcome gathering last week, experienced IMP teachers came to a consensus opinion based on their own “research”: IMP students end up being nicer!

Everyone knows that growing up in Minnesota makes all our students nice. If there are exceptions, we blame it on the cold. But this group of teachers, many of whom were delivering both IMP and sequential curricula during the current school year, agreed that IMP students outperform their non-IMP peers in this quality of being nice.

What are the variables in this research? The teachers listed a number of them:

• First and foremost, the group work helps to prevent isolation.
• The presentations help students develop a sensitivity to the other students when they are up in front of the whole class? ?I want to be respectful of their ideas so they’ll be respectful of mine when I’m up there!?
• The presentations also help students think on their feet, resulting in increased confidence.
• The IMP classroom fosters improved relationships between students and teachers. The students get to know the teacher better in the inquiry-based classroom, and vice-versa. The teacher tends to be more encouraging of students in the IMP classroom. In fact, students occasionally recognize that the teacher is also a human being!
• Even teachers who bring IMP instructional strategies into their sequential math classes find that it is difficult to eliminate the increased competition that tends to occur there.

Many of these teachers have supported IMP in the past because they were committed early on to leaving no child behind academically. But as they shared pop and pizza last week, they also realized that IMP helps them keep kids connected socially and emotionally as well. “Minnesota nice” now has a mathematical bent to it and these teachers have verbalized another important reason to work hard at their implementation of the IMP curriculum.

Fall 2001

In the Midwest Region, IMP™ continues to grow. In the Minneapolis metropolitan area, all schools in the Anoka-Hennepin school district will begin sections of IMP this fall. The high schools include Anoka High School, Blaine High School, Champlin Park High School, and Coon Rapids High School plus at least one alternative school program. They are on a four-period day (4 + 4) and at least a few sections will run IMP 1 for two semesters to give some students the opportunity to do the program at a slower pace. The Minneapolis public high schools are focused this year on high school reform. While our top students do well, many of our lower students do not connect to high school and we have an unacceptably high dropout rate. To reverse this, the district is asking each high school to divide itself into small learning communities of no more than 120 students per grade that will be based on some theme or philosophy. The plan is that all students will be able to make a program choice. There will be no “default” programs. Coupled with this is the expectation that we will continue to move in the direction of “best practice” in every classroom. As the consultants come through and lay out the principles of best practice for all subject areas, it is reaffirming to look at those principles and know that IMP met all of those expectations years ago.

Spring 2001

The big IMP news in Minnesota is the adoption of IMP in the Anoka-Hennepin School District, the second largest district in the state. Anoka has four large high schools, all on a four period day. IMP will be an option at all high schools. The first cadre of teachers has already begun training with experienced Minneapolis IMP teachers and attended TOPS (IMP’s National Leadership Training Retreat) in February in California.

Congratulations to two more Minneapolis IMP teachers who earned their National Board Certification in Mathematics. Sara VanDerWerf and Mary Moreira, both IMP teachers at Patrick Henry High School, received word in December that their applications met the standard. They join Carol Borne and Jane Kostik at Patrick Henry and Eileen Aberman Wells at Washburn High School as the five NBPTS certified high school mathematics teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools. All five give much credit to the strength of the IMP curriculum in helping them prepare to meet this rigorous standard.

The MASP project (NSF-funded collaboration of school districts in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area) was awarded a supplement to study student performance in the new integrated mathematics curricula in the 6–12 program. A study similar in design to the one reported in the Fall 2000 issue of IMPressions will be used.

Fall 2000

Minneapolis Public Schools is in the final stages of being awarded a five-year Urban Systemic Project from the National Science Foundation. This will focus on K–5 elementary mathematics and 9–12 science, along with continuing support of the Interactive Mathematics Program and Connected Math Project (CMP) in the middle and high schools. Lynne Garrett, who started her IMP career in Bakersfield, California, will be the project director of the Minneapolis program.

Spring 1999

Implementation of IMP in Minnesota is being carried forward with the support of the NSF-funded (MASP)2 project at the University of Minnesota. (MASP)2 provides 130 hours of professional staff development work for teachers implementing a NSF-developed mathematics curriculum for the first time. (MASP)2 was recently awarded a Minnesota Higher Education Eisenhower Grant to provide 48 hours of additional staff development for teachers implementing IMP Years 2–4. The (MASP)2 staff is beginning a study of student performance after 1–2 years of participation in a standards-based mathematics program.

The state of Minnesota is developing a mathematics test for eleventh grade students (1999–2000) that will assess achievement based on high standards. The test will evaluate conceptual understanding, procedural knowledge, and real-world applications and problem solving in the areas of chance and data analysis, discrete mathematics, algebraic patterns, and technical applications, as well as shape, space, and measurement. Students will not have to "pass" this test to graduate, but the results will be used to compare schools, to provide data for accountability, to evaluate learning opportunities for students, and to complement standards-based classroom assessment. The IMP curriculum should fit well with this test.

Our IMP students continue to get high scores on the very difficult International Baccalaureate (IB) exams. The success of IMP students in high school is partly due to mathematics programs taught in the middle schools. In Minneapolis, the Connected Mathematics Program (CMP) is taught to 80 percent of the seventh and eighth graders. IMP mentors have met with middle school teachers and parents to support their efforts and to inform them of the benefits of the challenging IMP curriculum. We also developed an advanced standing test (first used in spring 1998) to identify strong students from CMP who would be recommended for IMP Year 2 in ninth grade. The students who took that leap this year are doing well.

Fall 1999

Jane Kostik, an IMP teacher at Patrick Henry High School in Minneapolis, was honored recently with Minnesota's Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching Secondary Mathematics. The award was presented June 7 at a ceremony in Washington, DC, at the National Academy of Sciences. Her school will receive a $7,500 grant from the National Science Foundation.

The 104 secondary mathematics and science awardees met in Washington for a four-day whirlwind of formal events. These included the awards ceremony and reception at the National Academy of Sciences, semiformal dinner at the State Department, private reception at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, and breakfast on Capitol Hill with legislators.

Jane's "Best Lesson", on the statistics taught in Is There Really a Difference?, was published in a booklet along with the lessons of the other award-winners. There was structured time to network and exchange "Best Lessons" with the other math teachers. The trip was a thrill of a lifetime, and an opportunity to meet and make new friends—particularly IMP teacher JoAnn Vana from Vermont. (See New England regional news.)

Spring 1998

In November, three Minneapolis IMP teachers were awarded certification by the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards. The teachers are Carol Borne and Jane Kostik from Patrick Henry High School and Laura Myers from Washburn High School. Only 47 high school mathematics teachers in the country have received this certification. Carol Borne was also a finalist for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics Teaching.

In addition to the IMP implementation grant, Minnesota has been fortunate to have other NSF help in supporting NCTM Standards-based reform. We have just finished four years of Project Open Access, an NSF-funded project designed to introduce secondary math teachers to reform curriculum and encourage them to try lessons and replacement units in their classrooms.

We are now beginning a new grant, (MASP)2, which will support full implementation of NSF-funded secondary curriculums. This project is a collaboration of 24 school districts in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area. Districts who choose to implement a NSF-funded curriculum (including IMP) will be supported with 130 hours of training per implementing teacher, as well as mentoring services. This year, as a mentor under the (MASP)2 grant, Jean Stilwell has had contact with 100 teachers throughout the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area.

Districts are now in the process of identifying which curriculums they will use and how many teachers will need training. The grant can fund support to 500 teachers, but preliminary indications are that demand for the training will exceed that number. This grant, along with new state graduation standards, is having a major effect on moving school districts to reform their math curriculum.

Fall 1998

"I want your students in my calculus classes." was the opening statement from college mathematics professor Martha Wallace to IMP teachers attending training sessions in Minneapolis this summer. Wallace, who teaches mathematics and mathematics education at St. Olaf College, joined veteran IMP leaders Jane Kostik, Jean Stilwell, Sara VanDerWerf, and Mary Wells to bring a college perspective to the training for teachers of Years 1–4.

"Your students will bring to the calculus classroom a clear notion of functions and a conceptual understanding of rates of change," she told the teachers. "But probably even more important, they will arrive at college believing that mathematics requires deep thinking. From their IMP experiences, they will be confident in their own ability to think mathematically, and they will have strategies to attack problems that have no readily apparent solution methods."

"But the benefits of IMP will probably not be evident to someone who does not spend some time with the books," she warned. In preparation for the training sessions, Wallace had worked her way through the IMP curriculum for Years 2–4. "I did not truly appreciate the mathematical depth of several of the units until I traced my way from the opening problem situation, through the 'just-in-time' uncovering of the mathematics needed, to the concluding solution of what a few weeks earlier had seemed an impossible problem."

After working with IMP teachers for two weeks, Wallace offered her perspectives on the IMP curriculum as a professional development tool for teachers: "Teachers are learning new mathematics along with new ways of teaching. Some of the sessions seemed more like mathematics seminars as teachers thought deeply about the mathematics they were preparing to teach and worked together to solve POWs."

The summer IMP training sessions were supported by the NSF-funded (MASP)2 program, a collaboration of 24 school districts in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area. (MASP)2, which provides training and resources to facilitate the implementation of NSF secondary mathematics curricula in the member districts, will also support additional training sessions and mentoring during the school year.

Spring 1997

The Midwest Regional Training Center is continuing to grow and function, in spite of our challenging winter weather! Our expansion sites now include all seven Minneapolis public high schools, a suburban high school, an alternative high school, and an eighth grade class.

Minnesota Starts Statewide Testing

The State of Minnesota has begun the statewide testing of all eighth graders with a "minimum essentials" test, where all test items are embedded in real problem situations. The high school component, called "Profiles of Learning," continues the application of mathematics in problem situations-with students expected to produce work similar to IMP's Problems of the Week (POWs). The Minnesota version of the TIMSS report, being released in March, further documents the need for the IMP curriculum and similar K–12 programs in Minnesota.

Our Regional Center is part of the Minneapolis and St. Paul Merging to Achieve Standards Project (MASP)2, a newly funded National Science Foundation Local Systemic Initiative. There will be cadres of 20 teachers, each group headed by an experienced IMP staff development specialist, implementing the IMP curriculum.

Fall 1997

Sara VanDerWert, an IMP teacher at Patrick Henry, taught an actual lesson to 14 of her IMP Year 3 students in an extended session presented at the NCTM conference in April, 1997. These students were also able to participate in discussions with the teachers and administrators present at the session. Among the over one thousand sessions at the conference, this was the only one where actual students were involved. Sara and her students did an excellent job in representing the efforts of our IMP site.

In other news from last spring, students at Patrick Henry High School in Minneapolis, MN, took the International Baccalaureate (IB) test. This test is similar to the AP exam, and is recognized world-wide as a rigorous test of mathematical knowledge. Students on the traditional track of geometry, algebra, trigonometry, analysis, and calculus took the IB Math Methods test. IMP students took the IB Math Studies test, a test comparable to Math Methods, but for students in a non-calculus curriculum. Both tests carry the same weight in earning points for the IB diploma. Students may earn one to seven points on the test, where three is passing and six is excellent.

The results for IMP students taking the test were impressive. Compared to the 14 traditional curriculum students who took the Math Methods test and earned a mean score of 3.00, the 15 IMP students taking the Math Studies test earned a mean score of 3.93. And of those students who actually passed each test with a score of 3 or higher, there were 46% traditional students and 87% IMP students.

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