Welcome to the first issue of GeT: The News—the newsletter for GeT: A Pencil! The idea with this newsletter is to deepen our community bonds and share ideas. We plan to publish it three times a year and to include not only news from the GRIP Lab about our GeT Support project, but also essays by and notices from members of the GeT: A Pencil community. In this issue, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the Euclidean Archetype (pg. 1), examine tasks related to angle bisectors (pg. 2), and investigate a potential source of errors in triangle construction (pg. 4). I also encourage you to look at the list of events on page 2—there are some upcoming conferences that we’re very excited about and we’d love to see you there.

Hopefully, you have been involved this fall in some activities within the GeT: A Pencil community. We thought we’d give you an overview of the big picture. We have been running a cycle of Working Seminars since early October. Since then, we have held two seminars each month. Each seminar starts with a presentation by one of us (so far presenters included Amanda Milewski, Pat Herbst, Sharon Vestal, Shawnda Smith, and Nat Miller) and ends with questions for asynchronous discussion. If you have to miss the seminars, it’s worth noting that we record and post them in GeT: A Pencil, so you can catch up and still join in on the asynchronous conversation (use the Canvas Modules feature to find them). The working discussions have featured themes including teaching geometry with technology, teaching proof, instructional situations, and mathematical practice. During the first working discussion, Amanda Milewski spoke about key stakeholders we might need to hear from in order to learn about the needs and impact of Geometry courses for teachers. She shared that we have been interviewing administrators and department chairs at the K-12 level to get their input. In another seminar in January, you’ll have a chance to hear more about what we are learning from those interviews.

In addition to the working seminars, two working groups have been assembling within GeT: A Pencil: Transformations and Teaching GeT. The Transformations Working Group meets every other week. In their meetings during the Fall, they have been discussing goals in teaching transformation geometry. They are collecting possible starting axioms for a transformations-based class, and are sharing classroom activities and course notes. Julia St. Goar from Merrimack College manages the group. They have a Google Doc to which everyone contributes during the meeting time. This document also has a list of textbooks an instructor can use.

The Teaching GeT Working Group’s aim is to document the essential student learning objectives of a GeT course: are there common goals for the course, perhaps independent from the choices instructors make when they decide what type of geometry course to teach? This group meets once a month and collaborate to produce documents and resources for people who are teaching or will be teaching a GeT course. Nat Miller from the University of Northern Colorado leads this group. Each month, members of the group independently produce an assigned task, which Nat then synthesizes into a single document to determine common interests. Their most recent assignment was to come up with essential understandings for a GeT course (i.e., what are student learning objectives that instructors believe should be covered in any Geometry for Teachers class?). His group is building on the archetype work from from last year’s working group on the knowledge of geometry needed for teaching, which documents the various kinds of GeT classes in practice.

As all of this is happening in GeT: A Pencil, several of you have been teaching the GeT course. Your students have completed the MKT-G pre-test and are getting ready to complete the post-test. Several of you have also completed instructional logs, helping the community to document teaching practices used in the course. We are eager to share some gleanings of the aggregate once we have a critical mass from which to report. Like in previous semesters, we will soon be sending along the end-of-course questionnaire. And we look forward to working with those of you who will be teaching in the Winter and Spring. One change we will be making this year in regard to our aggregate reports is that we’ll hold off until May to give you an aggregate report of MKT-G growth. We’ll be presenting at AERA this year the results of the analysis of last year’s growth. Thanks to your collaboration, we have administered the MKT-G test to 222 GeT students, about half of whom were intending to be teachers. We think the results of our analysis will be interesting to you as a GeT instructor: we found that while those GeT students intending to be teachers had lower pretest scores than the other GeT students, their scores grew significantly more during the time of the GeT course. And while we can’t attribute causality to the course or to their career orientation, it is nice to know that some improvement of capacity to teach high school geometry is observable! We are hopeful we’ll be able to add to this information in our May MKT-G report.

I hope you enjoy this newsletter. Have a great holiday season—filled with well-deserved rest and relaxation with your loved ones.