Math specialist grade span

[Judy Werner]

While the AMTE document describes "elementary" math specialists, I
think it would be appropriate to expand our certification to pk-12.
In some districts, PSSA scores are good at the elementary level and,
while they may drop off a few points at the middle school level, they
are still good, but the high schools sometimes experience a drastic
drop.
This could be attributed to lack of interest on the part of students,
but not always. In the districts that require passing PSSA for
graduation, there is still a decline in scores - surely the students
are interested in graduating!

There is something else that needs to be addressed and based on the
research projects that I have been involved with and my personal
observations, I think there are teachers who teach in the middle and
high schools who need help.

I supervise student teachers in elementary, middle and high schools.
There are teachers at all levels who do not teach in a manner that
engages students and promotes student learning and understanding.
Many teachers teach directly from the textbook and do not engage
students(discourse), which leads to teaching a procedure and not
conceptual understanding. I sometimes see classes where the
cooperating teacher starts out with "write the definition that is on
the board in your notebook now turn to page XX, here is how to do
example 1, here is how to do example 2... do 1-30 for homework" end of
class! No questions - no interaction.
Please do not interpret this as meaning ALL high school teachers. I
have had the opportunity to work with some outstanding high school and
middle school mathematics teachers and have been very impressed with
how they help develop our preservice teachers.

Just because a person has a bachelor's degree in mathematics and
passes a content test for certification does not mean that they can
teach high school or middle school mathematics.

In addition, some of the other groups that we met at the AMTE
workshop were also looking at k-12 math specialist for their states
rather than limiting the certificate to k-5 and the project in
Virginia is expanded to k-8 with some pretty good results so far.

[Williams Steven]

While I haven't given the grade-span a ton of thought, I do tend to
agree that PK-12 is the most appropriate, even though I'm not sure of
all of the logistics involved with respect to differentiating the
instruction needed for different levels in the courses. I think that
personal preferences and hiring decisions will help to make the
correct decisions. There seem to be a lot of secondary "math coaches"
popping up, and from my conversations with many of them there hasn't
been any real training for them. It seems that these are teachers who
have been seen as "good math teachers who can help others." Then,
without training, they do seem to become more of a "mini-
administrator" because job descriptions aren't clear (although, I work
with one coach from Akron City Schools who seems to do a great job of
working with her teachers, helping them teach and all...but I also
know that she decided her job description for herself). In fact, I was
contacted last year by someone in the Baltimore City School District
who asked for my advice on his new role as a math coach. The district
had never had one before and they didn't have a job description
written. I thought to myself, "wow, let's just offer someone a job
with no job description...in this economic environment?"

Steve