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Responses to Core Questions for RM-MSMSP #0412343
1. The Partnership and Its Management/Governance Plan
1.1-How will higher education mathematics and science faculty be encouraged to attend the professional development sessions that this project will offer them? Will they be required to attend the sessions in order to teach the in-service courses for teachers? Where will these professional development sessions be held?
Higher education faculty who will teach the RM-MSMSP coursework will be required to attend the professional development sessions in order to teach each course. We would like to emphasize that these courses will be part of the regular teaching load for the faculty involved, representing part of the institutional change the project fosters. The sessions will be held predominantly at CU-Denver, but will encompass significant input from the partner districts and will include at least one session in a middle school. Faculty will receive an honorarium for participation in the professional development sessions, and participation will be rewarded as any other professional development activity (e.g. conference attendance), and the contributions of course development and implementation will also be rewarded in the merit evaluation process.
1.2-Please provide additional details about the summer camps. a. How will students be recruited? Will they be selected because of special needs or special interests in math and science?
The CSU and Ft. Lewis residential camps will recruit students through the Colorado Alliance for Minority Participation (CO-AMP), which is an NSF-funded statewide project that has contact with underrepresented students in 14 higher education and 4 tribal partners. We will be recruiting traditionally underrepresented students who will include Native Americans, Hispanics, African Americans, and students of low socioeconomic backgrounds. Middle and high school teachers will help recruit promising students who will benefit from the summer opportunities. Specifically, students will be recruited from the Southern Utes, the Ute Mountains Utes, the Navajos, rural areas around Ft. Collins, Pueblo, and Ft. Lewis, and the Front Range metropolitan areas. The selection process will target both students who have expressed a special interest in math and/or science as well as students for whom a summer experience such as this one could foster such an interest. The latter group will also include students who are high potential but low performing in STEM disciplines, as identified by their teachers and/or school administrators.
Participants in the Metropolitan State College of Denver (MSCD) summer camps will be recruited through the extensive teacher contacts in the database of MSCD’s Center for Mathematics, Science and Environmental Education and our many contacts with Front Range area school administrators. We will also avail ourselves of the free advertising available in area newspapers’ summer camps publications. Teachers, administrators, parents and community group leaders will nominate applicants by letter, and participants will be selected by a committee of faculty members involved in the program on the promise and enthusiasm they show in mathematics and science. Special attention will be given to students from underrepresented and/or economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Included in the application is a statement by the student about interest in science and mathematics and the reasons s/he wants to attend the camp. Interviews can be conducted if too many applications that are judged as being equivalent are received, and space is not available for all applicants.
b. Will parents at Ft. Collins and Ft. Carson drop the campers off each day and pick them up each night, or are these camps residential?
(Ft. Lewis?) The camps are residential. Parents are welcome to visit their children during the camp session as well as attend any activity that they would like to be part of.
c. How will faculty be recruited for work at Ft. Collins and Ft. Lewis? Have any agreed to participate in this activity? What are their fields of expertise?
Faculty will be recruited through CO-AMP contacts at each of the higher education institutions to design the curriculum and develop activities for the students. Many faculty members at both institutions have already agreed to be part of this worthwhile activity. The faculty will be reminded, via email, to sign their one page agreement on designing the curriculum and provide ideas of the activities two months before the camp starts. They will be receiving a stipend for their work, as well as learning about the cultural background of those students who are attending the summer camp so that they will gain professional development and be able to incorporate better practices within the classroom. Faculty fields of expertise are engineering, mathematics, chemistry, computer science, biology, and physics.
d. Please provide a biographical statement for Larry Johnson.
Dr. Johnson’s biographical sketch can be found at the end of this document (page 22).
1.3-Please describe the math, science, and technology program at the Denver Summer Science Institute. How will the project select students to attend? Will financial help be offered to these students?
The selection process is detailed above in the answer to 1.2. The grant will provide financial assistance to cover tuition, transportation, and materials and supplies for middle school students. In addition the program offers a stipend for the participation of high school students (to help offset money the student could earn in a summer job.) In addition monthly bus passes will be made available to the middle school participants to assist with the transportation to campus.
1.4-Drs. Kimbrough and Jacobson are listed as “coordinating mathematics and science activities for higher education faculty.” Please describe what this includes.
As part of their responsibilities coordinating the math and science activities for higher education faculty, Drs. Kimbrough and Jacobson will
· Work with other Arts and Sciences chairs to assign faculty responsible for teaching courses,
· Work with the project director (Bath) and district science and math specialists to organize and implement the professional development sessions for higher education faculty,
· In collaboration with the Executive Director of the Front Range BOCES (Sparks), facilitate the interactions between higher education faculty and district personnel so as to synchronize the curriculum between the two entities,
· Develop course catalog descriptions and obtain course approval from the necessary campus curriculum committees,
· Work with Arts and Sciences department chairs in assigning faculty to courses, scheduling necessary classroom, computer, and laboratory space for course offerings, and in recruitment systems for students in their departments into teaching, and
· Work with the project director and the Front Range BOCES executive director to help the partner districts recruit teachers to participate.
1.5-What particular project management challenges or obstacles, if any, do you foresee in your proposed Partnership? With what consequences? What strategies do you propose to address or manage these challenges/obstacles?
In a project of this magnitude and complexity, challenges will naturally arise due to the many collaborations that are necessary across the numerous institutional boundaries. In our case, the relationships across these boundaries are fundamentally solid and only expected to deepen as the project unfolds. Challenges will likely arise in four fundamental areas: 1) coordinating activities between higher education and district partners; 2) coordinating activities among higher education science and mathematics faculty, district personnel, and education faculty; 3) tackling district interactions and effecting institutional change at district level with respect to curriculum implementation and teacher reward, and 4) translating the proposed certificate process into state-wide endorsement of science and mathematics teachers at the middle school level. To address the first two areas we will rely on the long history of cooperation and interaction fostered by the Front Range BOCES[1], which fosters good working relationships across districts and with institutions of higher education, particularly with CU-Denver’s School of Education (SOE) where it is housed. As an integral part of the Front Range BOCES and as the result of well-established professional development schools in six districts, the SOE has excellent relationships with local school districts. The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) and SOE also have good relationships both at the administrative and faculty levels, recently enhanced as the two units have cooperated to institute undergraduate teacher education for the first time. CU-Denver’s CLAS faculty have a long history of both formal and informal interactions with local school districts through the CU-Succeed[2] program and numerous science and mathematics outreach projects. Anticipated challenges in the third area (inter- and intra-district) will likely include the cost of training and materials associated with adoption of the evidence-based curricula by a given district as well as the development of the differentiated instruction activities prior to field testing them. We are confident that these challenges are manageable. The cost of some of the materials associated with curriculum reform can be offset by the grant and the “economies of scale” represented by the partnership will make resources available to the partnership districts that would not be accessible if they were attempting this kind of curriculum reform on their own. Similarly, the combined expertise and experience of the collective team of the RM-MSMSP can successfully address the difficulty of developing the differentiated instruction activities. Higher education faculty will work with district specialists in the Jefferson County School District in their implementation and subsequent evaluation. Once this material has been developed and tested, it will be disseminated to the other partner districts (as well as other districts outside the partnership and/or other states) who will benefit from the work done in Jefferson County. Another concern within the partner districts is the “growing pains” associated with changes in the well-entrenched teacher reward system that are fostered by this project with respect to the certificate/endorsement process. As the RM-MSMSP demonstrates that partnership activities enhance student learning and achievement, districts are likely to improve in flexibility.
With its decade-long history of significant institutional change to meet external mandates and community needs, the SOE is ready to take the lead in addressing the fourth challenge (statewide endorsement). In the context of two state organizations that have not historically collaborated effectively (the Colorado Department of Education and the Colorado Commission on Higher Education), the implementation of new state endorsements for Science Specialist and Mathematics Specialist at the middle school level will necessitate some strategic planning and tactical implementation. The RM-MSMSP is up to the challenge, however, in that the School of Education Dean (Rhodes) has a strong positive relationship with various administrators in the two organizations and with a large number of influential educators in the state. This coupled with her understanding of the underlying state politics will facilitate a positive outcome, particularly when the projects’ efforts demonstrate effective enhancement of student achievement in mathematics and science.
2. Teacher Quality, Quantity and Diversity
2.1-Please describe the professional development curriculum for teacher participants in further detail. a. Attach a course outline, along with a list of texts and other references, for at least one such course in math and one such course in science from the summer institute.
Since part of the proposed activities include the development of this curriculum, providing a detailed course outline as well as a list of texts and references would be premature at this time, particularly since the curriculum will in some measure be driven by the information determined from the Teacher Content Inventory (see section 6.1). However we have devised a rough outline of a mathematics course, entitled Problem Solving, and a science course entitled, Atoms and Macroscopic Properties of Matter, which can be found in Tables 1 and 2 on pages 22 and 23. The content could change somewhat as a result of the Content Inventory. We have also developed a draft list of possible courses (Table 3, page 24) in both mathematics and science which includes some of the topics and concepts that could be covered in those courses. All of the science courses listed will have a laboratory component that will be inquiry-oriented and address both the process of science and the open-ended nature of scientific experimentation.
b. Please describe assessment instruments (include samples of assessment materials, as appropriate) used in the courses referred to in your answer to part “a”.
As described above, part of the proposed activities include development of such assessment materials, and a more detailed description will be part of our first annual report. The most effective assessment instrument will likely be the Teacher Content Inventory (TCI). During the Planning Phase, it will be developed and used as a method of garnering baseline data of teacher content knowledge and skills. The TCI assessment is described in detail in Section 6.1 and will rely on the work of Ball (2002) and Weiss (2003) which ties the teacher content knowledge to teaching practices so that teachers can honestly assess their abilities in a non-threatening, non-punitive environment. As teachers take the courses and participate in the Structured Follow Up, they continually revisit those questions (or new variations) and expand their answers to reflect added content knowledge and deepening conceptual understanding. The augmented TCIs will provide important ongoing assessment information and will drive the course revisions as deemed necessary by formative assessment. Additional assessment instruments will include standard coursework (quizzes, individual and group problem sets, presentations, laboratory reports, etc.) and performance-based assessments. During the development phase, we will design rubrics for each course as well as for the Structured Follow Up, which will address various aspects of mathematics and science comprehension (e.g. facts; conceptual underpinnings and interconnectivity; experimental design and implementation; and/or data collection, interpretation, and presentation) as appropriate for each course. Structured Follow Up rubrics will address teachers’ abilities to translate enhanced content knowledge into improved instructional practice and ultimately to the implementation of differentiated instruction.
2.2-Please illustrate how “differentiated instruction” would be used in one of the courses described in question 1 above. a. Select a topic (e.g. the Pythagorean theorem, the theory of evolution of species, or the theory of ionic bonding) and describe activities or materials that would provide appropriate differentiated instruction for each of two or more of the subpopulations of students in the Partnership districts. Explain how the two approaches differ and why the different approaches would be appropriate for these subpopulations.