I am excited to be writing to you with an update about the upcoming book entitled The GeT Course: Resources and Objectives for the Geometry Courses for Teachers. Since the RUME conference, the co-editor team has been busy finalizing the review criteria for the submissions that are due in May. At the conference, some of you shared concerns you had about the review process, including worries about what kind of review criteria might be used for handling such a diverse group of authors, as well as the need for rigorous criteria to ensure quality contributions. We want to assure you that we have taken these concerns into account and have developed a set of developmental review criteria that will encourage reviewers to provide feedback that not only assesses the quality of the contribution but also aims to support contributors’ professional growth.

We recognize that the authors of this book come from diverse backgrounds and may have different standards for peer review. Writing for such a diverse audience may make the review process feel intimidating for some. We do not want it to feel that way. Our hope is that the review criteria supports the kinds of interactions that give all our contributors a learning opportunity to improve their writing for a more diverse audience and creates a book that embraces the diversity of our community. To construct the review criteria, the editorial team has drawn inspiration from several sources, including the review criteria from popular journals such as PRIMUS and Mathematics Teacher Educator which aim to support individuals engaged in teaching teachers in undergraduate mathematics and teacher education courses. We have also paid particular attention to developing criteria that encourage reviewers to produce what Sandra Crespo, a former editor of Mathematics Teacher Educator, has called an educative rather than evaluative review. With that, we thought we could use this opportunity to share a bit more about what we mean by terms like a developmental or educative review. 

The idea of an developmental or educative review is not a new one. Peter Elbow, an English professor who devoted his career to democratizing writing, argued for the need for a more balanced approach to the review of academic writing. Elbow (2000) noted that as part of our training as academics, we are trained to take a critical stance toward new ideas—being as analytical and skeptical as possible. He called this the doubting game. Without discounting the importance of this kind of training, he advocated for the importance of embracing a different kind of stance towards new ideas—one that he called the believing game. In contrast to the doubting game, Elbow described the believing game as the “disciplined practice of trying to be as welcoming or accepting as possible to every idea we encounter: Not just listening to views different from our own and holding back from arguing with them… but actually trying to believe them” (Elbow, 2008, p. 2). He argued this kind of disposition as useful because in order to validly assess an new idea, even if we ultimately reject it, we must first dwell in it, really endeavoring to understand it, believe it, and see it from the viewpoint of the one who is offering the idea. Furthermore, if we only play the doubting game with other’s ideas, we run the risk of missing “what’s good in someone else’s idea” (ibid). 

For our own purposes, embracing the believing game has value beyond helping us, as individuals, better assess the merit of new ideas. The believing game is also highly consistent with the values that have been part of GeT: A Pencil from the beginning—values which have supported the gathering of a community of individuals drawn from a variety of backgrounds to support one another and help each other grow professionally while working together to improve the capacity for teaching high school geometry.

With this focus on the believing game, we have specified criteria intended to encourage reviewers to provide specific, constructive, and actionable feedback, highlighting strengths and opportunities for improvement in a way that helps authors to move forward. This mirrors the kind of feedback we have seen so many of you provide as you have walked through the difficult conversations about GeT courses that have informed the first version of the GeT SLOs. 

We look forward to sharing more specific details about the review process soon, and we invite all of you to join us in this exciting endeavor of engaging in a process of review that not only worries about improving the book’s contributions but also endeavors to continue expanding our community of support for individuals that have taken the risk to contribute a chapter for the book and count themselves as among the stewards for the undergraduate geometry course for teaching. Together, through our efforts in this review process, we can create a resource that supports the teaching and learning of geometry for teachers across a wide range of settings and experiences.

References

Crespo, S. (Ed.). (2016). EDITORIAL Is It Educative? The Importance of Reviewers’ Feedback. Mathematics Teacher Educator, 4(2), 122-125.

Elbow, P. (2009). The believing game or methodological believing. Journal for the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning, 14(3), 1.

Elbow, P. (2000). Everyone can write: Essays toward a hopeful theory of writing and teaching writing. Oxford University Press on Demand.