Two associate professors of the Morgridge College of Education received a federal grant, worth $307,229, to fund professional development sessions for Denver teachers from May to December in a collaboration with DU’s Division of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM).
The project, which will be supervised by Kent Seidel and Nicole Russell, the professors who acquired the grant, will strengthen math and science curricula and diagnose student needs in 10 Denver Public Schools.
Seidel said the Denver school’s recruiting and selection process is underway and should conclude “within the next three weeks.” So far, three schools have been selected, including Cole Arts & Science Academy, Greenwood Elementary and University Park Elementary. The program also aims to develop leadership within DPS and to create a community of in-house problem-solvers, according to Seidel.
“The project is trying to get teachers more comfortable with math and science to show that it isn’t scary,” said Seidel.
Seidel said he and Russell initially pursued the federal grant last fall due to its unique emphasis on collaboration between professors and teachers.
“We started talking about this process of collaboration over science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) wine-and-cheese get-togethers,” said DU mathematics lecturer Allegra Reiber. “We asked what DU could uniquely offer to the community and looked at Morgridge research combined with faculty experts.”
Rather than lecture teachers on effective classroom strategies, as many professional development series do, according to Seidel, what makes this program unique is the reliance on teachers’ leadership and insight to structure the programs.
NSM faculty members consist of associate chemistry professor Keith Miller, assistant dean of the Department of Biological Sciences Nancy Sasaki, and Jeff Farmer along with Reiber from the math department.
“The clicks aren’t being made,” said Reiber. “It’s a sign. Somewhere along the line, things stopped making sense. I don’t know why it’s okay for someone who says I’m not a numbers person when people are horribly embarrassed if they can’t read. After many years of math education, we can’t just all of the sudden let students off the hook.”
The teaching teams, composed of DU faculty members, two math and two science teachers from each of the 10 schools will attempt to explore students’ educational trajectories and the points at which they follow or get lost in academic content.
“One big focus will be student assessment and how to understand their kids’ needs,” said Seidel.
Seidel said for students to feel comfortable with the subjects, the teachers must be well versed in math and science as well.
“We’d like teachers to revisit the material instead of relying on textbooks and memories in order to come at the curriculum from different angles,” said Seidel.
Seidel said the program’s success will be determined by focus groups, talks with teachers and assessments, which will serve as an opportunity to see change over the allotted time frame.
“This is not a one-time thing,” he said. “After this project, we’ll tweak our resources and make it available broadly. Our hope, and the hope of DPS, is this information becomes a regular part of professional development, to have these units all over the state and share our research on open source … what else we might need to do to make those materials remains to be worked out.”
