In the Spring of last year, I wrote a note about what I envisioned the next stage of GeT: A Pencil could be. At that time, I noted that our first funding cycle was coming to an end at the end of August, and I indicated that we would write a grant asking for financial resources to support the development of a repository of primary and secondary resources for instructors to tinker with as they decide what to use in their GeT classes. We did write the grant but, unfortunately, it was turned down. We were advised to revise it and we did so this past June and July. A decision on it will likely come toward the end of 2024 or the beginning of 2025.

This state of affairs brings us to consider sustainability for a year between funding cycles. GeT: A Pencil has fulfilled an important role for GeT instructors. We are very active: producing an edited book, meeting in three working groups, offering biweekly seminars, and, in spite of the delay with this issue, publishing a newsletter. We also benefit from the participation of some high school geometry teachers, a feature that could grow as we move ahead toward the creation of resources. We want to maintain that positive momentum, but without funding, the work will need to continue being done voluntarily. In late June, we secured volunteer commitments from individuals to help take care of the basic functions of the community:  organizing the GeT Seminar (e.g., scheduling speakers, sending invitations) and stewarding GeT: The News! (e.g., recruiting authors for the various sections). 

We have also discussed how the working groups could be reshuffled and organized for next year, especially given the possibility that our revised grant proposal might get funded. The structure and focus of the working groups could help us not only sustain momentum but also prepare our community for the new funding cycle. For example, having developed the SLOs, our community is ready to start generating materials to teach the SLOs. Indeed, some of that has begun with the ESLO group, as members spent the 2023-2024 year discussing different tasks that might be used to review important content from high school geometry, hence supporting SLO3. 

I envision the work ahead will consider resource development across three different dimensions:

1. What do we mean by resources to teach an SLO? Anything beyond tasks to give students?
2. What is involved in the development of a resource? Anything beyond writing them and publishing them?
3. How are we going to cover all the SLOs?

In regard to the first question, this is something that the community will need to eventually settle on. However, to get us started, it is useful to consider a distinction between primary and secondary resources. Primary resources include tasks used with students as well as texts that we might want students to read in order to be able to do those tasks. Some tasks may be self-explanatory but others may require knowing definitions or taking some statements as known, and yet other tasks may be done for the sake of introducing important concepts that we might want to write in the way the students are supposed to remember them. Hence, primary resources are everything that the students would see. Secondary resources, meanwhile, are everything else that might support the use of the primary resources. The answer key to problems or a rubric to grade students’ work on problems are initial examples. Secondary resources may also include a description of errors students make when doing the problems, or a roadmap of possibilities that the instructor could use as they respond to how students work on a task. This consideration of primary and secondary resources suggests that we might need some precision in terminology. I am proposing to use “module” to refer to a set of primary and secondary resources that can be used to aim at at least one SLO. Each module encompasses both primary and secondary resources. 

With this clarification, the second question above can be restated as “what could be involved in the development of a module?” And indeed, the development of a module seems to involve much more than writing a task. It surely starts from having an idea of the task or tasks around which the module would be developed, but it would also be important to write the texts that students would need to read before and after engaging with the task/s. In addition, the suggestion that secondary resources would make the modules richer implies that module development involves more than writing. It could also involve anticipating student work, trying the modules out with our classes, collecting real but anonymized student work to include as secondary resources, examining the student work to inventory the difficulties students had in the task, and possibly using that information to improve the writing of the tasks and texts. The development of a module would surely take some time and it could use having access to classes where the instructor is willing to try the tasks. Furthermore, having a group of members of GeT: A Pencil involved in developing each module would make the work not only more fun and more of a learning experience but  it would also bring to the work the variety of talents present in our community. It would be reasonable for this development to take a full year of meetings for each module.

This brings me to the third question. Our working group structure would allow us to gather individuals interested in working on developing specific modules. In the past, we have had three concurrent working groups. Moving forward, three groups could continue to run, and the scope of work of the new grant proposal could provide a suggestion of what they could be doing. At a recent meeting to discuss the sustainability of the community, an idea was proposed of choosing three different days and times in the week and asking community members to sign up for the day and time they would be most likely to make.Then, at their first meeting, each group could decide on one SLO to focus on, taking care not to choose one that has already been covered. Each working group could use the year ahead to focus on developing a module for their chosen SLO, and we could use the newsletter, community meetings, and the seminar for people to share across groups. That idea seems worth a try. We’ll be sharing a “whenisgood” calendar to identify three meeting times and will then ask you to sign up for the one that is best for your schedule. 

To conclude, in the coming year we will not have any financial resources to offer conference support, incentives, or much staff support. Despite this, we are hopeful that some functions can be maintained at a smaller scale and on a voluntary basis. In particular, I am optimistic that the continuation of the seminars, the newsletter, and the working groups will support the continuity of our community while paving the way for new developments in future funding cycles. We hope you are able to join us for this next stage of GeT: A Pencil!