Welcome to our second issue of GeT: The News! This newsletter, published three times a year, helps us connect to and communicate with members of GeT: A Pencil, an inter-institutional support network for instructors of Geometry for Teachers (GeT) courses and high school geometry teachers. The network was developed with the goal to provide support for collective stewardship and connection-building across individual instructors. It is housed at the GRIP Lab at the University of Michigan School of Education. 

In the new year, we have continued to sponsor two monthly seminars for members of our community, starting with presentations by Claudine Margolis and Mollee Shultz that reported on interviews they have been conducting with individuals whose work connects in one way or another to geometry for teachers courses. On January 24, Claudine shared preliminary interview data from secondary school leaders in Michigan, including high school mathematics department chairs, state and district mathematics leaders, and school principals. On February 4, Mollee shared information about how department administrators at the college level staff geometry courses. (Click on a date to watch a recording of either seminar.) 

These interviews support the more general aim of identifying the sources of the problem that we have been describing as the need to improve instructional capacity for teaching high school geometry. As instructors of geometry for future secondary teachers, members of GeT: A Pencil are part of a larger system responsible for supporting students’ learning of mathematics at the secondary level. High school geometry plays an important role in students’ mathematics education: not only does it provide them with a distinct “language” of representation that they can use to visualize real world problems and abstract ideas, but it can also bring students closer to theoretical mathematics as it involves them in practices such as conjecturing and proving. As such, high school geometry can play an important role in recruiting students for STEM careers. If we accept that the quality of students’ mathematical experiences depends at least in part on the quality and quantity of their teachers’ knowledge, it would follow that the quality of future teachers’ experiences in geometry courses for teachers might have consequences for high school students. As those high school students continue through their studies, good experiences in mathematics courses might support their decisions to study more mathematics in college, or perhaps even to consider mathematics teaching themselves. But of course, things may or may not turn out that way: unprepared geometry teachers may also teach courses devoid of any interest, turning students off to the pursuit of more mathematics. Instructional capacity seems like it should be a key factor to consider when staffing high school geometry courses as well as other high school mathematics courses. We have been wondering who the players in the K-12 and college levels are that can contribute to understanding the problem of instructional capacity.

The first players we identified were members of GeT: A Pencil, and we have been interviewing each of you to understand how you think about the undergraduate geometry course for teachers. Gleanings from those interviews have suggested to us other stakeholders to reach out to. Clearly, mathematics faculty who teach GeT courses are not responsible alone for teacher preparation; education faculty and staff also play a role and we are beginning to interview them in search of insights on how they think of their role in improving instructional capacity for teaching geometry. In particular, we are speaking to mathematics department administrators who have to find instructors for GeT courses, asking what they look for in an instructor and how easy it is for them to find one. Cognizant that staffing may also have some difficulties at the high school levels, our interviews of high school mathematics department chairs and district mathematics coordinators have included questions such as how easy it is for them to find teachers who can and want to teach high school geometry. Finally, we have reached out to college graduates who took GeT courses as undergraduates and later joined the teaching workforce. We have asked them whether and how they’ve felt prepared and excited to teach high school geometry, and how those sentiments connect with their experiences in GeT courses. 

These interviews are helping us conceive of surveys that we’d like to distribute more widely to gauge the extent to which instructional capacity for teaching geometry is a problem. We would welcome your input in this project: Do you have ideas for topics or questions to include in these surveys? Or do you have suggestions of other groups of stakeholders who might have perspectives that are useful to collect? Submit any thoughts or ideas about the survey questionnaire here. 

Enjoy this newsletter and consider contributing an essay yourself (details are on pg. 5). I know we’ll see some of you at the RUME conference in Boston on February 27. Looking forward to it! I hope that the Spring semester continues to bring you professional satisfaction, and that you are able to take some time off to enjoy yourself during Spring Break!