Fonzi Scores the Warner School's Largest Grant Ever

A new $2.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation will go a long way toward extending Judith Fonzi's work in mathematics education reform with partners in four local educational institutions. Even before the award -- the largest government grant ever made to the Warner School -- collaborating with local school districts was nothing new to Fonzi, director of the Warner Center for Professional Development and Education Reform, and principal investigator for the five-year project.

Teachers and administrators in the Greece, Penfield, and Rush-Henrietta school districts have been collaborating with the Warner School for more than three years to examine and refine their K-12 mathematics programs. Those educators and the Warner Center mathematics faculty committed them-selves to the goal of guaranteeing every student a high-quality mathematics education, then began to identify the components of such a system to meet this goal. They analyzed the needs of their own students and read the reports of government task forces and business leaders. As a result of their research, each of these districts has adopted some new instructional materials and methods that foster problem-posing as well as problem solving, mathematical reasoning, and communication.

Classrooms where children are learning to think of math as a tool to help them understand the world "feel different" than more traditional math classrooms.

Cindy Callard, outreach coordinator for mathematics for the Warner Center, began the school year by presenting her seventh grade students with a picture of a honeycomb and posing the question "Why do you think bees' honeycombs are made up of hexagons and not some other shape?" Some students hypothesized that the bees might want to use a shape "closest to a circle," in order to maximize space for the honey, but they noticed that circles would leave small holes in the honeycomb. "But why not decagons?" one student asked.

Honeycombs are anything but a one-shot parlor trick to capture students' interest. The problem Callard posed, and the children's resulting exploration, are part of a research-based comprehensive mathematics curriculum grounded in the theory that students learn best when they can reason logically and make connections to other things they already know. Throughout this particular unit, Callard's students will continue to think about the honeycomb and its shape.

They'll use various shaped tiles of regular polygons to explore the sides and angle relationships of polygons and to consider the student's question "But why not decagons?" They will make conjectures about the answer to Callard's original question and develop mathematical tools to either prove or disprove those conjectures and clearly communicate their mathematical results with others.

As classroom practices begin to change, students have started to pose new mathematical questions that spark teachers' interests in expanding their own understanding. As they respond to these more complex questions, the teachers themselves seek deeper mathematics comprehension. The new grant will provide in-depth professional development for teachers and offer opportunities for parents, other school professionals, and community members to learn more about mathematics to support their children's learning.
Not all the partners came to the arrangement looking for mathematics reform tools. Educators at the Genesee Valley Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), a state-delineated group of 23 rural school districts that share support services, joined the collaboration after it was established. They had been seeking a partnership that could help them meet their need to prepare teachers to help all children learn. They believed the mathematics partnership would help them reach that goal.

The three districts and Genesee Valley BOCES are all partners with the Warner School on this grant, aided by the University of Rochester mathematics department, which will collaborate on the creation of the new professional development experiences.
"Inviting students to be active learners has been really exciting for the students, teachers, parents and those of us fortunate enough to be involved in this work," says Fonzi. "Together we are discovering that mathematics is a way of thinking about the world which encompasses reasoning, computation, and creativity."

Email your news to: warnernews@rochester.edu

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Archived Issues
October 2002