County students to benefit from $1.1 million math grant

A lot of the news surrounding education the past few months hasn't been good.

Teacher layoffs. Lack of funding. Schools doing this or that to save money.

Administrators, teachers, staffs, and school boards have been scratching their heads trying to figure how to provide a quality education with less.

Do you want some good news?

It came today from the Indiana Department of Education, Indiana University, and the Greene County Grant and Professional Development Consortium.

The Indiana Department of Education will provide more than $1 million over the next three years to continue the Greene County Math Advancement Partnership Program (Greene MAPP).

The project, a collaboration of the Indiana University School of Education, the IU Department of Mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences and the five school corporations in Greene County, is concluding an original two-year grant, which focused on helping kindergarten through sixth-grade teachers learn new techniques for teaching math concepts.

The new grant of $1,103,548 will extend the program to teachers in grades four through eight.

"This new grant is the result of the collaborative effort of all five school corporations in the county, a collaborative effort that took shape in 2004," Shirley Byrer, co-director of the Greene County Grant and Professional Development Consortium, stated in a press release.

Sophie Haywood, also co-director of the consortium, added: "I am thrilled that we have the opportunity to continue the positive work that has been started with Greene MAPP. The community partnerships that are new to this grant will play an important role in getting students engaged and excited about math."

The new grant will help integrate technology as a learning tool for math.

"We're going to be continuing the strand on fostering algebraic thinking that we have in the current grant," said Enrique Galindo, associate professor of mathematics education and the project's director of the academic team.

"We are going to be working on integrating technology as a tool for learning mathematics. We're also going to be working on project-based learning. The new grant also has partnerships with engineers and scientists, so we're trying to bring real life to the math classroom."

The project extension allows IU faculty to build on the results they've seen with Greene County teachers through monthly meetings and daily interactions with a roaming "math coach."

Kevin Pilgrim, associate professor in the IU Department of Mathematics, said the breakthroughs came over time, noting how he and Signe Kastberg, math education professor and associate dean of academic affairs for the IU School of Education at IUPUI, would try to enable teachers to discover the new methods themselves.

"They would listen to each other and Signe would point to someone across the classroom and say, 'Hey did you understand what he said or she said?' and make them explain it to each other," Pilgrim said. "Through a very gradual process, we began to realize that it was OK for adults to talk about math just for the fun of it, to learn and explore ideas."

Some teachers say they feel better equipped to teach math effectively than before starting the program.

"I expected the kids to follow along and get their little work papers and books and do it," Kathy Neill, a first-grade teacher at Bloomfield Elementary School, shared in the press release. "This has really changed my thinking. Now we're letting kids explore math."

During a concluding session with program participants, Neill and partner Tara Sparks, a first-grade teacher at Eastern Greene Elementary School, demonstrated how they've excited kids through games created with playing cards and dice. Both say the methods have not only empowered them as teachers but the students as learners.

"The kids in my class have been taking them out at recess to play with them," Sparks said in the press release. "They don't want to put them down. They think of math as a game, not just sitting at their table writing on a piece of paper."

The program allows the teacher to feel more empowered and release some control to the students. The program allows teachers to ask questions that invite thinking among the students.

"They see the different ways that they can actually implement the tasks and then engage their students in mathematical reasoning and thinking and solving problems in really creative ways," said Dionne Cross, assistant professor of Mathematics Education. "They're a lot more confident and they feel a lot more freedom, I think, in trying out new things and kind of stepping away from their old way of doing things."

This is great news for Greene County students. Math and science are so important in today's world, and it's good to know area teachers have another tool to make our children successful.

Chris is the general manager/editor of the Greene County Daily World. He can be reached by telephone at 847-4487 or by e-mail at cpruett79@gmail.com .