Rocky Mountain Regional Center

Sprng 2004

When teachers in the Rocky Mountain Region attend an IMP workshop, they do more than mathematics—they write, talk, and reflect. They work with partners, as well as in small mixed groups and school teams. They read a wide range of professional articles on topics like cooperative learning, effective questioning, and classroom climate. They practice coaching each other as a prelude to coaching students. Six years ago, Alan Olds, Colorado Writing Project (CWP) teacher consultant, first brought these practices to IMP-RMR workshops. Since then, Alan has shared some of the professional learning strategies used by CWP and, in turn, has taken what he has learned from working with IMP mathematics professional development back to his writing colleagues. The practices shared by both include working from broader goals to specific activities, using a learner-centered approach in workshops, providing time for collaboration, and reflecting on how teachers should shape their classrooms and professional lives. Alan credits IMP-RMR Director, Jean Klanica, who has given staff and teachers in her region numerous opportunities to experience what the best professional learning looks like. Project staff have attended workshops on professional development sponsored by West Ed and the Mathematics Education Collaborative, and have also applied a wide range of resources and research from NSF, National Staff Development Council, and Eisenhower National Clearinghouse publications. “By looking for ideas about professional learning both within and outside the mathematics community,” says Klanica, “we have been able to learn from a variety of successful reform initiatives. What they have in common is a focus on the big issues of education reform— sustainability, equity, transformation of teacher beliefs and practices, focus on student learning, and community outreach. What we do in mathematics supports what teachers are doing in reading and writing, science, and technology.” And mathematics reform is supported, in turn, by teachers who have gone through programs like the Writing Project. IMP-RMR staff have found that “our collaboration aligns IMP with a wide range of education reform efforts, which multiplies its impact. Together these changes in teacher attitudes and practices are making a difference.”

Spring 2003

Don’t forget the counselors! As Pueblo East High School IMP teachers began their second year of implementation, they were discouraged with the low enrollment in their two IMP 1 classes. Each class had fewer than 20 students and did not represent the range of student ability of East freshmen. Rather, the students in these classes were predominantly those who had not been successful in mathematics. The four IMP teachers, George Anderberg, Shirley Muniz, Lori Quigley, and Linda Sanchez believed that counselors were not well informed about IMP and this was affecting the low enrollment. As George said, “Counselors control our lives. If the counselors don’t know what is happening, the students don’t know what is happening.”

The IMP teachers decided to take action. In February, as middle school registration approached, they gave a presentation at a meeting of counselors, which included all four East counselors and all of the counselors from their two primary feeder middle schools. Their goals for the presentation were two-fold: they wanted the counselors to realize there is an alternative route to learning mathematics that might be more suitable than the traditional route, and they wanted counselors to know that IMP is not a remedial program. George began the presentation by providing background on the need for change in mathematics education. He shared results from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) along with some of the problems students were tested on.

Shirley introduced the counselors to the content of the IMP curriculum. Her presentation explained the integration of the curriculum in each year and provided counselors with a sense of the level of mathematics that students were getting in IMP using, in part, a clip from the PBS video, “Life by the Numbers.” She shared with counselors a “route map” that the four teachers had designed as a way for counselors to understand how IMP fits with the traditional sequence of courses also offered at East.

Lori talked with counselors about the colleges and universities across the United States where IMP students have been accepted for admission. She also wanted counselors to “hear” from a mathematics professor at one of these colleges. She accomplished this by summarizing the foreword to the IMP 3 book written by Graeme Fairweather, head of the Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Colorado School of Mines. Counselors received handouts of the college list and foreword to share with parents and students. Linda concluded the presentation by showcasing student work on POW’s from The Game of Pig. She discussed the writing and problem solving that students engage in while solving POW’s and emphasized how their work is much more in depth than simply showing an answer. She also shared the comments of a parent whose son is in his second year of IMP at East. Despite some writing limitations, he has been successful in the program and is engaged in the mathematics he is learning. At the end of the presentation, counselors indicated that they were amazed—no one had previously shared this information with them.

The four IMP teachers deemed the presentation a success when the scheduling process began. The number of students requesting IMP 1 enrollment necessitated the scheduling of five IMP 1 classes. According to the IMP teachers, these classes had higher numbers and were more heterogeneous than in the past. Furthermore, counselors helped to schedule students already having completed one or more years in the traditional sequence into IMP classes. In short, counselors had developed an understanding of the challenging mathematics contained in IMP, mathematics that is, in fact, accessible to a wide range of learners.

Fall 2002

Five ground-breaking mathematics teacher leaders from the Rocky Mountain Region have been recognized as Presidential Awardees for Excellence in Secondary Mathematics Teaching since 1998. Each of the five awardees was the first teacher in his/her school district to implement IMP. Each teacher continues to be involved in leadership roles throughout the region promoting mathematics opportunities for all students.

Spring 2002

One focus of our project is to keep parents and other members of the school community informed about the value of the IMP curriculum in preparing students to engage in real mathematics. Lew Romagnano, Professor of Mathematical Sciences, shares the following letter with parents.

To Parents:
Mathematics is the search for patterns and relationships. It is the development of tools and procedures for tackling quantitative and spatial problems. It is summarizing, drawing conclusions from, and inferring from large and diverse piles of data. It is the only subject in which something can be proved to be true, as part of a system of systematically developed prior truths.

If this description of mathematics is surprising to you, I am not surprised. But I am saddened by the fact that your years of experience as a student in typical mathematics classes did not give you a chance to engage in this creative and dynamic discipline.

What the teachers at [your school] are doing by offering the Connected Mathematics Program in the middle school and the Interactive Mathematics Program at the high school is giving your children the opportunity to do real mathematics, and to do it in ways that make the most sense given what we know about how children learn.

I could not be more supportive of their efforts. I have had enough experience with “successful” mathematics students—students who did well enough in mathematics and liked it enough to choose to major in it in college—who have had little or no experience with the discipline I described above. I want students at my school who have the kinds of experiences your children will be provided if they take CMP and IMP.

The teachers at [your school] need more from you parents than your acquiescence. They need your active support for their efforts. Teaching mathematics the way they propose is much more difficult than simply showing students techniques for solving certain types of problems and having the students practice them. They will be putting in many hours outside of class, collaborating with each other and with others around Colorado undertaking similar efforts, all to provide an authentic mathematics experience for your children. You need to be aware of the high level of professionalism they maintain.

And for students, learning why as well as how, explaining and justifying their own thinking and the thinking of others, is much more of a challenge. Your children might not like this challenge at first. They may think the rules have been changed on them. In fact, they have. However, the old rules applied to a game that no more represented real mathematics than vocabulary lists and sentence diagramming would represent true literacy. You need to support the efforts of your children, not by doing their homework for them but by encouraging their engagement in the tasks set by their teachers.

I am much impressed by, and grateful for, the commitment of [your school] faculty to the mathematics program they have begun to put together, and I support their work enthusiastically. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Lew Romagnano, Ph.D., Professor of Mathematical Sciences
The Metropolitan State College of Denver

Fall 2001

The Rocky Mountain Mathematics Leadership Collaborative (RMMLC) begins its second year with more than 60 schools in the project from Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming, including 44 high schools and 17 middle schools. RMMLC held 13 professional development workshops this past summer for school leadership teams, teacher leaders, and teachers of the IMP, MiC, and CMP curricula.

Leadership teams composed of the principal, a counselor, a parent, the mathematics department chairperson, and mathematics teacher leaders attended a two-day Leadership Summit. Teams focused on ways to support curriculum implementation in their buildings. Teacher leaders also studied Cognitive Coaching in the summer leadership workshop to prepare them to mentor and coach their colleagues.

Leadership workshops during the 2001–02 school year will continue to support teachers’ work in their school buildings. Mathematics teachers from RMMLC schools participated in curriculum workshops for IMP, MiC, or CMP. To support the many middle schools that joined our project this year, we have extended our curriculum support to include the MiC and CMP curricula. Middle school mathematics teachers attended a one-week MiC or CMP workshop in the summer and will participate in three days of workshops during the school year along with the IMP teachers.

Spring 2001

Through our six years of experience in supporting schools implementing IMP, we have learned that a focus on developing teachers who are knowledgeable in mathematics and pedagogy, while necessary, does not guarantee the successful implementation of a reform mathematics program. Issues such as ongoing professional development and enlisting support from administrators, counselors, parents, and the school community are all a part of keeping reform alive.

IMP-RMR is currently continuing to support schools in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and Wyoming to make sustainable improvement in mathematics education through a National Science Foundation–funded grant entitled Rocky Mountain Mathematics Leadership Collaborative (RMMLC). The primary goal of RMMLC is to create school leadership teams in middle schools and high schools implementing a reform mathematics curriculum.

Leadership teams from thirty schools in the Rocky Mountain Region attended a two-day Leadership Summit in summer 2000. These teams, consisting of the principal, a parent, a counselor, the mathematics department chairperson, and mathematics teacher leaders identified and examined the implementation issues relevant to their school and then created an effective leadership plan to address these issues. Teams meet monthly during the school year and are supported by visits from RMMLC staff.

Teacher leaders attended a four-day Cognitive Coaching workshop during the summer and are participating in Developing and Facilitating Collaborative Groups during this academic year. These workshops focus on supporting teacher leaders in conducting effective meetings, facilitating group decision-making, and mentoring their peers using the cognitive coaching model.

We continue to offer our summer and academic-year IMP workshops to provide high school mathematics teachers in RMMLC an opportunity to expand and deepen their understanding of mathematics content, instruction, pedagogy, and assessment.

Fall 2000

Late on a summer Friday afternoon, over 100 teachers are huddled in ten groups around a school cafeteria complex. In each group, the teachers have been looking at student work, reading about a teacher’s efforts to grade this work, and are now engaged in lively discussion about the issues raised by this situation. In each group, one teacher is clearly the facilitator, asking questions, posting responses, and posing tasks. “Broadening Our Horizons” (BOH) is the IMP-RMR teacher leadership workshop. These week-long courses are designed for teachers who are at least two years into the IMP-RMR professional development program and who want to take more of a leadership role in their departments, schools and communities.

The ten participants in this year’s BOH workshop engaged in three types of activities designed to help them meet the following goals:

• To become more focused observers of classroom practice
• To provide colleagues with support through “cognitive coaching”
• To use case discussions as a professional development activity with colleagues

The classes for teachers in their first and second year in IMP-RMR-going on concurrently in rooms down the hall-provided the venue for BOH participants the observe class and interact with the instructors. Using the framework provided by the Cognitive Coaching program, participants learned about and conducted planning conversations with the class instructors, themselves experienced IMP-RMR teachers. BOH participants also provided focused feedback to the instructors via reflective post-observation conferences.

Teachers in each IMP-RMR course read and discuss a supplementary book chosen by the instructors. For this year’s BOH workshop, this book was On Becoming a School Leader: A Person-Centered Challenge (Combs, Miser, & Whitaker, ASCD, 1999). Participants read chapters for homework and discussed them after lunch each day.

Woven throughout the week were three “case discussions,” structured group activities built around written or videotape situations that raise complex sets of issues for mathematics teachers. Alongside these discussions, participants engaged in meta-conversations about ways to incorporate and design case discussions with colleagues in their schools.

By Thursday afternoon participants were using their developing coaching skills to prepare—in pairs—to conduct their own case discussion activity, the project-wide activity portrayed at the start of this article.

Spring 1999

Although it seems the school year is far from over, IMP teachers in the Rocky Mountain Region are busily preparing for parent information evenings and student registration for the 1999–2000 school year. Each school designs its own program for informing parents, students, counselors, and administrators about the IMP curriculum and the instructional practices used to implement the program. We have found that no matter how many years a school has been offering IMP, many people in our educational community are still very interested in finding out more about the program and the positive learning results students have achieved.

Fall 1999

We have much to celebrate. With the completion of our Rendezvous the first week of August, teachers are gearing up for the beginning of the school year. Our summer institutes had more than a hundred participants, all of them looking forward to an exciting year of teaching IMP.

We are also celebrating that Dottie Kielian from Skyline High School in Longmont, Colorado, and a participant in our project for five years, has received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Secondary Mathematics Teaching. Finalists for this coming year's Presidential Award include four-year IMP veteran Cathy Martin from South High School in the Denver Public Schools and Alan Tennison, a two-year IMP teacher from Valley High School in the Albuquerque Public Schools.

All of us at IMP-RMR, in Colorado, and across the nation are also celebrating the reopening of Columbine High School.

Spring 1998

Because of our growth and the need to diversify responsibilities, the IMP-RMR organizational structure has expanded into what we call the "Directions Team". Michelle Novotny, a veteran IMP teacher, facilitates the program coordinator component of our project and the development of a teacher curriculum. Alan Olds, a language arts teacher at a non-IMP school, facilitates the electronic communication networking component. Lew Romagnano is organizing the "practical products" of our project and Sherri Stephens-Carter is facilitating the collection of student achievement data. Jean Klanica facilitates the overall administration of the project as well as the financial component.

There are 23 schools involved in our program, including 21 schools in Colorado, one school in Cokeville, Wyoming, and one school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We will be adding seven new schools for the 1998–99 school year, including two inner city schools, three rural schools, one private suburban school, and a New American School. The number of schools in our program, along with the geographic and demographic diversity of those schools, are the elements behind our most pressing issue at this time: to create a method of operation that will provide a quality support system for our teachers.

Fall 1998

IMP-Rocky Mountain Region (IMP-RMR) just finished a very busy but exciting summer of professional development. During June, over 130 teachers participated in the four levels of the IMP-RMR Implementation Workshops, including 50 Year 1 teachers from Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Wyoming. Also, 12 teachers who have been in the project for at least two years participated in the Broadening Your Horizons workshop designed to help experienced IMP-RMR teachers broaden their perspectives on the practice of teaching mathematics. In July, 48 high school teachers from Colorado participated in a 30-hour Baker's Choice workshop sponsored by IMP-RMR and the Colorado Department of Education. These same teachers will meet again in February to share their experiences of implementing this unit in their own classrooms.

Beginning this fall, there will 29 schools actively involved in IMP-RMR, including 27 schools in Colorado; one school in Cokeville, Wyoming; and one school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We will be adding seven new schools, including two inner-city schools, two rural schools, a private suburban school, a charter school, and a New American School.

One major goal of the project is to make certain that schools will be able to sustain professional development when funding from the project is no longer available. As the work of IMP-RMR begins to wind down (two more years), the project schools are designing plans to continue the ongoing professional development model initiated by the project. Nine schools entering their fourth year of participation in the project will be piloting their support plans during the upcoming school year.

Spring 1997

We're hard at work building participation and support for IMP in the Rocky Mountain Region. Consider joining us if you are a high school mathematics teacher who:

• Is struggling to create a classroom reflective of the NCTM Standards
• Is interested in alternative assessment ideas
• Would like to change and would benefit from support
• Would like to experience learning as your students do

For more information, call Jean Klanica at 303-751-0895.

Fall 1997

Interactive Mathematics Program–Rocky Mountain Region (IMP-RMR) began in the 1994–95 school year with five Colorado schools and about a dozen teachers. As the 1997–98 school year begins, IMP-RMR has expanded to 23 schools, including one school in New Mexico and one in Wyoming, and about 90 teachers!

The experience and expertise of the faculty at Eaglecrest High School, one of the original IMP-RMR schools, informed our professional development model which includes a two-week summer workshop for teachers new to IMP, a one-week summer workshop for those teaching a new year of IMP, a three-day retreat prior to the start of school for all project teachers; quarterly one-day gatherings for all project teachers, and a three-day immersion one month into the school year for first-year IMP teachers. Additionally, there are weekly visits from project staff who observe and meet with project teachers, regular communication via e-mail, a daily professional-development period for project teachers in their first two years (in addition to the planning time usually provided by their schools), and leadership development activities for experienced project teachers.

As IMP-RMR has grown, administration of the project has been reorganized and broadened. In addition to the three project directors, two new leadership team members have been added this year. The leadership team coordinates the efforts of the large team of program coordinators and facilitates electronic communication among the project's participants. IMP-RMR is currently funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Gates Family Foundation, the Colorado Department of Education, and participating school districts.

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