We are excited to finally announce that we are soliciting papers for a book about GeT courses! You can find the official call for papers here: https://getapencil.org/get-writing-rfp/. This book aims to be useful for everybody interested in the undergraduate geometry courses taken by pre-service teachers. In an earlier article (https://www.gripumich.org/v3-i3-sp2022/#towards-the-development-of-a-prospectus-for-a-get-a-pencil-book), I outlined some of the possible topics in that book, the core of which includes elaborations and perspectives on a set of Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) the Teaching GeT Working Group has been working on.¹ The book is also expected to include contributions that feature instructional tasks that can be used by instructors of the course to address particular SLOs (similar to the kind of work the Transformations Working Group has been developing) and assessment tasks that can be used by instructors for gathering diagnostic, formative, or summative information about pre-service teachers’ knowledge of various SLOs. 

I am writing on behalf of my co-editors, Pat Herbst, Nat Miller, and Laura Pzdrowski, with two calls to actions: (1) consider contributing a chapter and (2) help us get the word out to others who might contribute a chapter. Our hope is that you, as a reader of GeT: The News!, will see the call for proposals as something to respond to. If you are already counting yourself out of authorship, please hear me out! We envision this book to be the kind of place where both instructors of the course and other stakeholders could contribute their perspectives. Perhaps you are an instructor who has not been involved in the development of the SLOs. Maybe you are a mathematics educator or researcher who does not teach a GeT course. Perhaps you are a high school mathematics teacher that at one time took an undergraduate geometry course. Maybe you are a mathematics consultant or teacher leader that handles professional education for inservice teachers. Maybe you are an educational administrator responsible for hiring or evaluating high school mathematics teachers. Maybe you are a mathematician, concerned with the preparation of teachers, or perhaps you are a faculty developer interested in the scholarship of teaching and learning and faculty learning communities. If any of those describes you, there may be a role for you in the book. 

If you are wondering what kind of contribution you could make, as a member of the editorial team for this book, I would like to express that we see a role for all of you—so much so that if we do not hear from you, we are committed to finding ways to seek you out (Don’t say you weren’t warned!). For one, we have already begun to discuss ways we can gather perspectives on the SLOs from a wide variety of stakeholders. This includes everyone I named above, as well as some that I did not (e.g., parents of high school geometry students, higher education administrators that rely on or staff the GeT course, designers of assessments for teachers, individuals that work at state departments of education, etc.). We are also looking for instructors who have yet been uninvolved with the development of the SLOs to share their perspectives on the SLOs. We also think that there are some clear opportunities for others, such as mathematics educators, professional development providers, high school mathematics teachers, mathematicians, and mathematics education researchers, to get involved in making submissions–by offering perspectives about the SLOs, submitting instructional materials connected to the SLOs, or suggesting ways of expanding the circle of stewards of geometry for teachers

Next, in order to convince the as-yet-unconvinced to make a contribution to the call for proposals, it might be important for me to say more about what the core kinds of contributions might look like. As noted above, we see this book as a place where a wide variety of stakeholders could share their perspectives about the SLOs. The Working Group that first proposed the SLOs envisioned them as a living document that might undergo revisions as the original version were exposed to a wider and wider set of perspectives. In fact, we have already gotten started. We are currently in the process of convening a new working group, including GeT instructors who had not been involved in the drafting of SLOs and experienced secondary geometry teachers who know what the demands of teaching high school geometry are, in order to start gathering complementary perspectives. We hope that a team of individuals from that group will contribute a chapter or two. If you are interested in learning more about the SLOs, you can view them at the following website: https://getapencil.org/student-learning-objectives/. A plethora of previously-published articles in GeT: The News! provide examples of what it might look like to take a perspective on one or more of the SLOs (see A GeT Course “Classic”: The Euclidean Archetype in Vol. 1 Iss. 1, Understanding Student Thinking on Transformation Congruence Proofs in Vol. 2 Iss. 1, On mathematical knowledge for teaching geometry and the SLOs: A Reflection in Vol. 3 Iss. 3; Proof: The Heart of the Geometry for Teachers Course in Vol. 2 Iss. 1). 

In addition to seeking perspectives on the SLOs, we are thinking the book could be a place for a variety of individuals to share materials–whether they be activities or assessments–that could serve as resources for instructors, including lessons, assessment items, and assignments targeting specific objectives from among the SLOs. These contributions could be drawn from a variety of sources—including materials that have been designed and used with individuals different from GeT students (e.g., materials drawn from work with inservice teachers in a professional development context, or materials drawn from high school geometry classrooms). Examples of these kinds of contributions abound in our prior newsletters, and many of those articles may be reasonable starts for contributions (see When More is Not Always Better: On How NOT to Approach an Elementary Construction in Vol. 1, Iss. 3, The Geometry of Sunlight in Vol. 2, Iss. 3; People and Clubs: An Axiomatic System in Vol. 2, Iss. 2, Exploration, Construction, and Proof as Resources for Teaching Geometry Through Problems in Vol. 1, Iss. 2)

As one of the editors of this volume, I realize the vision I have outlined here—to gather a wide variety of stakeholders to make contributions—is ambitious and something the editors will not be able to achieve alone. For these reasons, we are looking to you to help us accomplish this vision by spreading the word about this call for proposals. In order to partner with us on recruiting individuals that will expand both the number and type of contributions, it might be helpful for me to further elaborate on the agenda I describe above with some examples. In these examples, I will intentionally focus on the types of contributions that might be made uniquely by stakeholders different from GeT instructors and that you may have in your networks. I focus on these examples because I believe that without some kind of recruitment action on our part, it is unlikely we will receive the kinds of contributions I describe, and my hope is that by providing these examples I can expand our collective thinking about what different kinds of submissions might contribute.

One kind of stakeholder, distinct from GeT instructors, is an individual employed at an institution that has responsibility to procure or design assessments for gauging professional knowledge held by secondary mathematics teachers (e.g., a mathematics consultant at a state department of education or a psychometrician at a test development organization). This kind of individual might be uniquely positioned to contribute a chapter that makes connections from the SLOs to current assessment instruments used to assess secondary mathematics teachers’ professional knowledge. We could envision, for example, a conceptual contribution from such an individual that identifies connections and possible disconnections between the SLOs and the underlying objectives assessed within widely-recognized assessments. This kind of individual might also be uniquely positioned to contribute a chapter that provides information about what is known about teachers’ professional knowledge related to the teaching and learning of secondary geometry. Both of these contributions could go a long way in helping inform the work of GeT instructors related to the SLOs.

A different kind of stakeholder is an individual serving as a high school geometry teacher. One way we could envision a high school teacher contributing their unique perspective is by offering a reflection on the kinds of challenges they experienced in transitioning from their undergraduate experience to the teaching of geometry or the challenges they have seen newer colleagues experiencing when they are assigned to teach geometry for the first time. For example, in such a reflection, a teacher could share about the kinds of experiences they had in the undergraduate course and how those experiences did or did not prepare them for their work teaching high school geometry. This kind of reflection can help shine a light on the importance of various SLOs as well as potentially identifying other learning objectives and pondering whether they are captured among the current SLOs or might need to be considered for inclusion. Another way we could envision such a person making a contribution is by writing case studies about how high school students grapple with different kinds of mathematical tasks common to the high school geometry curriculum and the way a teacher uses their knowledge of geometry to support students’ learning. For example, a high school teacher might elect to implement one or more of the tasks that have been featured in the GeT: The News! (e.g.,Teaching for Understanding in Vol. 1, Iss, 2, Illustrating a modeling approach to high school geometry: The pool problem in Vol. 2, Iss. 3, or Reflecting on the SunRule as a Multiplication Model in Vol. 2, Iss. 3,) and share anonymized artifacts illustrating how high school students think about this task or how they responded to those ways of thinking. Both kinds of contributions can be valuable resources for GeT instructors in terms of shaping instruction and offering alternative perspectives on the SLOs.

In offering these examples, my hope is that I have stretched your imagination about what various contributions to the recent call for proposals might look like. I also hope that these examples have supported you in developing some of your own ideas about ways we can think more broadly about the contributions for this book—and that you will share those ideas back with us (either in the form of a proposal or through a conversation–or both). 

Prior to closing, I want to use this opportunity to invite you all to an online conversation with the co-editors. It is scheduled for October 21, 2:00 PM ET. You can find more information about this event here.

With that, I will close with a call for two community-wide actions:

• For everyone reading this, please share either this article or the call for proposals with others. We ask that, as you do, you think broadly about the variety of individuals that are in your network–the diversity of roles, expertise, perspectives–whose contributions would be beneficial to our collective.
• For those of you reading this that have not yet considered making a contribution, please reconsider. If you have an idea for a contribution but are unsure how it might fit, feel free to reach out to me or another of the co-editors. We would love to grab coffee with any of you–in person or virtually–to discuss your ideas and give feedback. 

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¹See https://getapencil.org/student-learning-objectives/