Original Vision
The Implementing Investigations in Mathematics (InMath) project was designed to support elementary teachers in their endeavor to improve mathematics teaching and learning. This four-year project was based on a collaboration among Western Michigan University and more than 350 elementary teachers and administrators from six school districts in southwestern Michigan who had recently adopted the Investigations in Number, Data, and Space (Investigations) curriculum. We felt it imperative not only to support these teachers to think differently about teaching children mathematics, but also to encourage them to reconsider what it means to be learners themselves and thus rethink what professional development could be. The main objectives of the InMath project include:
- improving teachers' mathematical content knowledge,
- extending teachers' understanding of the pedagogical underpinnings of the Investigations program,
- facilitating teachers' abilities to critically analyze teaching and learning through the development of a community of learners, and
- fostering the development of teacher-leaders.
The original plan for professional development to meet these goals included the following main components.
Summer Workshops
The plan was to offer three week-long summer workshops, each centered on the big mathematical ideas in a particular strand: number and operations (1999), geometry and measurement (2000), and data and change (2001). A fourth summer workshop was added for 2002, focusing on algebraic and numeric thinking as a way to revisit important computational issues. More than half of the summer workshop sessions focused on the development of mathematical content. These sessions were designed using activities from the Investigations curriculum itself, thus providing teachers the opportunity to learn mathematics themselves with understanding. Teachers were organized in heterogeneous grade-level groups, rather than having a lower elementary and upper elementary grouping, so that they could more readily reflect on the progression of mathematical ideas throughout the K-5 curriculum and beyond. The remaining sessions were mainly designed to provided an opportunity to focus more specifically on pedagogical issues through such activities as exploring a single unit at a particular grade level, analyzing student work on a particular task or series of tasks, and reflecting on written or video cases.
Leadership Component
During the first year, a Coordinating Council (with membership from each participating school) met monthly to assess project activities in order to make adjustments and improvements. The plan was that this group would help shape the design of district-specific activities, provide feedback on planned professional development, and support the development of teacher leadership at each site. After the first year of the project, this Council was replaced by a cadre of twenty teacher-leaders, who then participated in substantial professional development designed to develop their notions about leadership and what it takes to support change in their districts.
School-Year Meetings
In our original plan, we had planned two venues for school-year professional development: bi-monthly district-level meetings and an annual Saturday conference. Our intent was that the Coordinating Council would help shape the structure and content of those district-level meetings. Based on feedback from Council members and our own work in classrooms with teachers challenged to implement Investigations well, we designed an additional format for professional development, the Reflecting on Teaching (RT) session, that revolved around the complex decisions inherent to teaching for understanding. For each of the remaining three years of the project, we offered a series of six RT sessions, one at each grade level, kindergarten through grade five, as well as cross-grade RT sessions during summers II, III, and IV.
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