This new edition of GeT: The News! arrives on the brink of the second anniversary of the COVID 19 pandemic–not that anybody wants to celebrate that birthday. However, I do celebrate that, in the midst of this enduring disruption, our community has continued to be involved in several joint projects. As we took stock of our 2021 activities when we met earlier in January, I realized how much the work of this community means to me. 

The completion of the writing of the chapter titled “A cross-institutional faculty online learning community: Community-guided faculty development in teaching college geometry for teachers” was a particular highlight for me. It brought attention to something I have always believed in–that professionals can learn from each other as they collaborate on tasks that pertain to their usual work. In one way or another, this idea has been behind most of the GRIP’s efforts to create opportunities for professional learning. Rather than assuming that we know what instruction should look like and that we should tell that to instructors, we prefer to create work environments in which instructors can collaborate solving problems of practice and envisioning improvements. The text of the chapter, as well as the work that went into getting the chapter written, suggest that, at least with the GeT: A Pencil community, our approach to professional learning can work. I think of it as soft professional development; we may not know ahead of time what we are going to learn, but the actual learning that eventually takes place feels more authentic than what one usually gets in professional development workshops that follow a set agenda. The group-generated projects, namely the identification and elaboration of student learning objectives and the development of activities to teach geometry via transformations, have that kind of authenticity to them; yet the most important learning that has been taking place is of a social nature. We have learned to work together and complement each other, accepting the talents and the quirks that everybody brings.  

When we started the GeT: A Pencil community three years ago, we brought together a group of instructors of geometry courses for teachers under the premise that an inter-institutional community might fulfill a need; because within each mathematics department there are usually few instructors who teach geometry, it is unlikely that learning communities specific to the subject matter can be organized within institutions. At the 2018 conference, we noticed how much of a divide there seemed to be between those trained in mathematics and those trained in mathematics education and suspected that collaboration might take effort. While our initiative to bring mathematicians and mathematics educators together is only one among many, it is good to see that after three years of working together, the community has not only endured but also grown in numbers, as well as in collective accomplishments. 

At our meeting in early January one comment suggested that GeT: A Pencil has functioned as kind of a virtual mathematics department. I loved the metaphor. In fact, I wondered if it might suggest a path forward in the development of expertise for the mathematical preparation of teachers. Might similar communities be developed for instructors who teach mathematics classes for elementary teachers, for example? 

The pandemic has touched our lives in many ways, but at least in regard to the work of GeT: A Pencil, it has not prevented us from continuing to learn from each other. Instead, as much of our regular work has also been happening through video conferencing, it seems that the difference between inter-institutional and intra-institutional collaboration has become less salient.