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In-service program documentation
Learning about resources to support instructional innovation (D7.3)
Logistics and scheduling information (by Raffaella Borasi)
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| Choice of scope and format for this activity |
| Scheduling of this activity within the program |
| Materials needed to implement this activity |
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Choice of scope and format for this activity:
Comprehensive curricula that are informed by the NCTM Standards and try to support teachers with novel instructional materials have only begun to be published since 1996. Therefore, they have become an important component of our in-service professional development program only since Implementation D.
In fact, in this last implementation occurring in the context of a Local Systemic Change Project, becoming familiar with these novel curricula and considering the possibility of adopting one of them schoolwide has become the focus of the phase of our professional development program that follows the one described in these materials. At the same time, we think it is important, even within the first year of the program, to make teachers aware of these instructional materials and discuss their potential for their teaching.
The experience reported in these materials, therefore, was developed only in Implementation D of our in-service program. This experience comprised of two main components:
So far, as the focus of the second component of this experience, we have experimented with excerpts from several texts coming from the "Connected Mathematics Project", "Mathematics in Context" and "Seeing and Thinking Mathematically" series, and found all of them wortwhile. However, here we have chosen to report only the "Facilitator's plan" for the experience developed around the first Investigation in the unit "Bits and Pieces I" from the Connected Mathematics Project, which we found especially appropriate for this activity because of its novel approach to a topic that is at the core of the traditional math curriculum.
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Scheduling of this activity within the program
This activity requires about 15 minutes to introduce the various curriculum projects, and about 1 hour to 1 1/2 hour to read and discuss each "unit excerpt".
In Implementation D of the in-service program, this activity was scheduled for the second half of the first project-wide follow-up meeting. While the first half of the meeting involved the round-robin sharing on the participants' first "experience as teacher" of one of our illustrative inquiry units, this activity was intended to provide a resource as participants were beginning to think about their second inquiry unit. As it involved the examination of an excerpt from each of the projects we were currently looking at -- i.e., "Connected Mathematics Project," "Mathematics in Context," and "Seeing and Thinking Mathematically" -- it took a total of about 3 hours.
For following implementations of our in-service program, however, we have planned a 1 1/2 hour session on the last day of the Summer Institute to both briefly introduce the available curricula and to engage the participants in an activity around the first Investigation in the "Bits and Pieces I" units from the Connected Mathematics Project.
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Materials needed to implement this activity:
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