In this past year, the GeT: A Pencil community has been very productive in terms of the dissemination of scholarship about the collaborative work happening within the community. For example, at the time of this writing the GeT Transformations Working Group has shared their work developing and co-teaching a series of lessons focused on the geometric transformations embedded in the Adinkra Symbols in a few outlets—including the 2022 RUME conference (https://www.gripumich.org/2022/04/24/get-a-pencil-represented-at-rume-2022/), the AMTE 2022 conference, and the AMS blog (https://blogs.ams.org/matheducation/2021/05/06/best-laid-co-plans-for-a-lesson-on-creating-a-mathematical-definition/#more-3605). Similarly, the Teaching GeT Working Group has shared their work focused on developing a set of Student Learning Outcomes (GeT SLOs, hereafter) in a variety of contexts—including numerous articles contributed to GeT: The News! and presentations at the 2022 AMTE and 2020 and 2022 RUME conferences (https://www.gripumich.org/2022/04/24/get-a-pencil-represented-at-rume-2022/). Also, several instructors have collaborated with members of the GRIP lab in efforts to share about the formation and development of the GeT: A Pencil community in higher education outlets—such as a chapter for the upcoming Handbook of STEM Faculty Development and a roundtable discussion at AERA (https://www.gripumich.org/2022/04/27/grip-at-the-2022-aera-annual-meeting/). 

In light of these efforts, the GRIP Lab recently (January 2022) proposed the idea of advancing the community’s dissemination efforts with the publication of an edited book. Our initial suggestion to the community has been met with enthusiasm, both during the meeting and in the intervening time since that initial discussion. Pat and I have invited Dr. Nathaniel Miller and Dr. Laura Pyzdrowski to join us for some initial discussions regarding how we can get going with the project. 

I would like to take this opportunity to report about those conversations and, in doing so, share some of our initial ideas. So far, our meetings have focused on the following topics: (1) what the content of such a book might be, (2) some potential publishers we might approach with the idea, and (3) a rough timeline for ensuring the project is completed in a reasonable timeframe. In what follows, I share details about the first item—our initial ideas about the content of the book—in hopes that you, as part of the community of individuals that read GeT: The News!, will provide feedback we can use to further shape our efforts to envisage what such a book might look like. We conceive of the book being comprised of contributions that fit roughly within six topics that I describe briefly below.

Topic 1: Background about formation of GeT: A Pencil 

This topic emerged out of our collective sense that it might be important to provide the reader with some context about the formation of the community. Some of the contributions that might fit within this first topic include: the complexity of the system of improvement that surrounds GeT courses from the perspective of multiple stakeholders; things we have learned about the existing variations in GeT courses from various instruments such as the MKT-G, syllabi collection, instructional logs, and end of course surveys; the ways that an online inter-institutional community can serve as a kind of “virtual mathematics department” focused on development of a course and instruction within a given course; and a retrospective description of the development of GeT: A Pencil. These contributions may help identify the value of the projects the community has undertaken. 

Topic 2: Background and elaborations of the SLOs

Contributions to this topic would complement, without simply duplicating, the work that has been ongoing over the last two plus years to articulate the SLOs. Unlike the future SLO website which will contain the “official” elaborations produced by the collective teaching GeT group, we envision the inclusion of this topic as providing opportunities for smaller teams of authors to provide more personal accounts regarding what a particular SLO means to them. In seeking contributions to this topic, we plan to encourage contributors to work in smaller groups in order to produce chapters about some of the diverging perspectives that have emerged during the development of and/or conversations about the SLOs—with the real possibility that there will be more than one chapter per SLO. Our hope is this will result in a focus area that encourages readers to engage with the larger conversations underlying the development of the SLOs by putting these multiple perspectives about the SLOs in conversation with one another. Unlike the SLOs and their elaborations, which speak with a collective voice and articulate a compromise arrived at by a certain date, we surmise that a diverse set of perspectives on the SLOs will help keep alive the various strands of discussion toward the goal of the SLOs being a living document. 

Topic 3: Supporting the SLOs in instruction

We hope that the inclusion of this topic would create an outlet for the plethora of efforts within the GeT: A Pencil community and possibly elsewhere to share instructional activities. For example, the inclusion of this topic area could create opportunities for individual or teams of authors to further develop some of the past GeT: The News! articles that have focused on the sharing of instructional activities. Also, this could create an outlet for some of the work on the Adinkra Lesson that has been ongoing in the Transformations Working Group or for expansion on the work that started back at the beginning of our community’s existence in the GeT task repository working group. Crucially, chapters contributing to this topic area will provide the authors with the opportunity to go beyond simply describing an activity, providing space to allow them to account for the activity in terms of how it can help serve in the instructional support of the SLOs. We imagine that both members and nonmembers might want to participate in writing these illustrations and that the editing process could help connect the writing to the SLOs, so that even if someone does not quite know how the activity they do can be connected to any SLO, the printed result will make that clearer. We think this can be a strategy for disseminating the SLOs as well as inviting commitment to the SLOs by others (in this case, authors that publish their activities).

Topic 4: Assessing the SLOs

For this topic area, we seek to include chapters focused on the assessment of the SLOs. This could include contributions focused on the process of constructing items for assessing the SLOs, what we might learn about students or GeT courses from the administration of such items, the uses of such items for various purposes within GeT courses (diagnostic, formative, summative), the construction of different types of rubrics for grading or scores those items (holistic, analytic), and various perspectives on such items and their use with GeT students. We have seen some examples of what this can be like in notes written by Michael Weiss in this and the previous issue of GeT: The News! Again, both members and nonmembers could share assessment activities they use and comment on how these target the SLOs.

Topic 5: Sustaining the work around the SLOs

We thought it might be important to include a topic that looks to the horizons of this work–naming work that is ahead and fleshing out what that might look like. As of right now, this is the least developed topic area, but we are open to ideas. We have some ideas about general terrain that could be named. We also have a few ideas for chapters related to the longer run implications of the SLOs on things like the MKT-G instrument. To be clear, as a group, we are not yet sure if this is its own topic area or something that could be subsumed into the next topic area, as a kind of commentary about the SLOs. But we thought in this early stage, we would at least share the idea about the topic and invite you to respond with ideas you might have in mind. Since the beginning of the community, we have regularly heard from many of you about ideas you have for the ways this work might be expanded and sustained in the years to come. Perhaps this topic area could be a place to start filling out those visions into fuller proposals. Let us know what you think.

Topic 6: Reactions from the Stakeholder communities

For this topic, it might be valuable to have reactions about the SLO work (or perhaps particular chapters from the edited collection) from those that might well represent the stakeholders of the system that contains the problem of improving the capacity for teaching high school geometry. This system includes not only the GeT course but also the institutions that make demands on and provide resources for the course as well as those institutions which stand to benefit from and feed the GeT course. In this topic area, we envisioned inviting contributions the following types of individuals: mathematicians that influence or have, in the past, influenced the GeT course; mathematics educators that have had some investment in the teaching and learning of K-16 geometry; authors of frequently used GeT textbooks; mathematics education researchers who have done basic research on children’s thinking about geometry; mathematicians or mathematics educators with a more international focus on geometry; individuals that have served in administrative roles in university mathematics departments; individuals who have stewarded teacher education credentialing processes at the university; individuals who have played a role in projects that look at improvement in ways different from the strictly institutional perspective; practitioners who have experience working in and with high school mathematics departments to improve geometry instruction; educational researchers who have methodological expertises in the areas of survey and assessment design; and possibly also recent graduates from teacher preparation programs who may have the ambition to write and could bring a fresh perspective. 

In sharing these roughly sketched abstracts for the topics to be included in the book, our hope is that in the next month or so you will find ways to reach out to one or all of the four of us and provide your thoughts. This could include suggesting additional topic areas and ways to expand or collapse these topics, along with any other thoughts you might have. So, please, don’t be a stranger. We really do endeavor for this to be a product that serves our collective aims to disseminate about the work we have all been engaged in these last few years together. You can reach us at the following addresses: Amanda Brown (am******@***ch.edu), Pat Herbst (pg******@***ch.edu), Nat Miller (na**************@**co.edu), and Laura Pzydrowski (la***@********ki.ws). We are also planning to have a discussion about this project during the GeT: A Pencil Community meeting on Friday, June 10, 2022 @ 2:00 to 3:30 pm. We are hoping by scheduling it for the same time slot as our seminar series, we will enable as many community members as possible to attend and share their thoughts.