Catching a
Comet

In an idyllic setting, a Montana professional development program creates the next generation of leaders in mathematics education.

Story by Bracken Reed, photos by Pam Voth

CANYON FERRY LAKE, Montana—Outstanding professional development opportunities can seem almost as rare as the appearance of Halley’s Comet, which blazes on to the scene once every 76 years. During the course of a career, how many conference sessions, classes, or development institutes will a teacher attend that truly have the power to change the way he or she teaches? Where is the training program that adds significant content knowledge and pedagogy to a teacher’s repertoire? That offers long-term guidance instead of a quick-fix or a one-time “drive-by” training session?

No Child Left Behind, with its demand for highly qualified teachers, research-based practices, and adequate yearly progress, has made the search for worthwhile development programs even more pressing. Educators are looking for proven products and programs that can have an immediate impact on student achievement.

In Montana, one such program has been developed by a group of veteran math teachers—with the backing of the Montana Council of Teachers of Mathematics (MCTM) and funding from NCLB. Taking advantage of a federal Mathematics and Science Partnerships grant, they created a comprehensive program with both short- and long-range goals. In the short term, teachers are given a wealth of direct, practical content knowledge and pedagogy that can have an immediate effect on classroom instruction. At the same time, the program offers yearlong support, builds professional bonds that eliminate isolation, and fosters a new generation of leaders that will help shape mathematics education in the state for years to come. The program, which debuted in 2005, is called Creating Opportunities in Mathematics for Exemplary Teaching, or COMET, and it’s charting a new course across the Big Sky.

Finding a Place To Land

Northeast of Helena, the Canyon Ferry Dam blocks the route of the once-mighty Missouri River, forming a 27-mile-long reservoir called Canyon Ferry Lake. Built between 1949 and 1954, the dam was part of the post-World War II dam-building frenzy that permanently altered the rivers of the American West. An undeniably impressive structure, the dam drains 15,860 square miles of the Great Plains, providing the area with irrigation, cheap electricity, flood control, and a popular recreation spot. Although it would be unrecognizable to Lewis and Clark, who passed this way in the summer of 1805, there is still a wild beauty here. Grizzly bears no longer roam the area, but bald eagles still soar overhead and hundreds of pronghorn antelope graze the surrounding plains. Its mixture of wildness and modern recreational convenience has made it the most visited lake in the state.

Just around the corner from the dam, nestled up against the far northern end of the reservoir like a miniature Levittown, sits a group of 15 houses arranged in a tidy horseshoe formation. Once used to house the engineers and administrators who oversaw the construction of the dam, this little spot in the road has been home to a series of educational endeavors since the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) donated the facilities to the Montana Office of Public Instruction (OPI) in 1996. For most of that time the “campus” housed the Montana Science Institute, which created a central office, dining facility, dormitories, a library, classrooms, and makeshift laboratories out of the prefabricated houses. In 2004, the Science Institute was dissolved and merged into a new nonprofit organization to serve Montana’s mathematics and science teachers. This organization officially became the Montana Learning Center (MLC) in January 2005, and it’s here that COMET found a home.

Drawing on Experience

The driving force behind MLC is the same group of veteran math teachers that wrote the COMET grant application. Jean Howard, the center’s communications director, is a recent retiree with 26 years of teaching experience. Her stellar teaching career included a Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics Teaching, the Montana Christa McAuliffe Fellowship, and a term as president of MCTM. She is one of the best-known and most respected math educators in the state, and as such she is both MLC’s public face and its top organizer.

The second member of the MLC/COMET team also has nearly 30 years of teaching experience. Richard “Dick” Seitz, the financial director of COMET is a National Board Certified high school teacher, a Presidential Award winner, and the current western regional representative on the NCTM board.

The other two members of the grant-writing team, Jennie Luebeck and Gary Bauer, have equally impressive résumés. Luebeck is a math professor at Montana State University-Bozeman, whose primary research specialty has been the development of mentoring systems, distance learning, and other professional development opportunities for rural K–12 math teachers. Bauer, the professional development director for COMET, is a longtime educator who currently directs the SIMMS (Systemic Initiative for Montana Mathematics and Science) Integrated Mathematics Project at MSU-Bozeman, an NCTM standards-based mathematics curriculum that encompasses all four years of high school math and promotes hands-on, activity-based work. The SIMMS curriculum is now being implemented or piloted in 21 states throughout the country and receiving rave reviews.

The common thread for these four is their involvement in MCTM. Over the years, each has contributed to various MCTM-driven projects, institutes, training sessions, and materials whose acronyms are a veritable alphabet soup: from SIMMS to MPAW, STEM, and STEP. Together, their experience reads like a shorthand history of the last 30 years of math education in Montana, all of which went into the development of the COMET program and the formation of the learning center at Canyon Ferry Lake.

Putting It All Together

The math-science partnerships grant was a chance for MCTM, the Montana Learning Center, and this tight-knit group of educators to put all of their experience into one comprehensive program. As they sat down to write their proposal, the implicit question was: What would the ideal professional development program for K–12 math teachers look like? Their answers, based on experience, a fresh look at the research, and the feedback of fellow MCTM members, were remarkably similar.

The program would be long range and systemwide, offering support for teachers throughout an entire year. It would be tightly focused, with a limited number of goals, and seek depth rather than breadth. It would combine both content-area knowledge and pedagogy. It would be hands-on, practical, and activity-based. It would address both state and NCTM standards, and would incorporate multiple evaluation measures, including student test scores. It would involve partnerships with MCTM, the state’s Office of Public Instruction, higher education, and a small group of partner schools. And finally, it would recruit participants from among the neediest schools in the state: the most rural and isolated, the most ethnically diverse, and with students from high-poverty families.

This ambitious agenda would require significant planning time—a realization that shaped one of the most unusual aspects of the grant. They would form design teams for each grade band: K–5, 6–8, and 9–12, and take the entire first year of the two-year grant to design the program. As Howard says, “That was really unique. I’ve never been involved in a grant where you had an entire year to design it; where you’ve been able to bring in the people from the partner schools, as well as key people like mathematicians from the universities, and put their heads together and get that kind of cohesiveness.”

As the planning moved ahead, the specifics of the program took shape: Each grade band would be limited to a maximum of 25 teachers. These participants would need to apply, with preference given to the staff of the seven partner schools. Each individual grade band would then meet for intensive 10-day institutes at the Montana Learning Center facility on Canyon Ferry Lake in summer 2005. This would be followed by site visits to every participating teacher’s school during the following year, as well as group meetings at two statewide conferences. In summer 2006, the individual grade bands would meet again for final five-day institutes. In between, they would stay connected via a listserv and would receive assignments, such as reflecting monthly on their teaching practices. Each teacher would be required to develop an action plan at the beginning of the program, which they would revisit at regular intervals during the school year.

In addition, it was decided that each grade band would be led by two facilitators and that the summer institutes would involve at least one outside presenter. For Howard, the choice of facilitators was critical. “We were very, very sure when we were choosing the facilitators that they weren’t just people with awards, and they weren’t just people who could go out and present, but that they were actual classroom teachers with a lot of presentation experience.”

Taking It Home

At the end of June 2005, the 10-day institute for the 9–12 grade band is wrapping up. The sky is a brilliant blue—the afternoon temperature edging into the mid-80s—as birdsong fills the air and the sun scatters diamonds over the lake. The 23 participants—high school teachers from across the state—are indoors, hunched over their posttests, which will be measured against the pretest they took 10 days before, one of the many measures used to evaluate the success of the program.

The two high school facilitators, Lisa Wood and Lisa Scott (“the two Lisas” as they are called here) sit in deck chairs and reflect on the whirlwind experience. There is a last-day-of-school feeling in the air—part relief, part reluctance to say goodbye. The isolated setting, two weeks of dormitory life, intensive learning sessions, and relaxed social time have played out exactly as the designers hoped: Bonds have been formed that will carry on beyond the life of the program. Between the tennis games, canoe trips, rides in the pontoon boat, and plenty of food and drink, the teachers have been immersed in hard-core mathematics: parametrics, matrices, graphing quadratic equations, data, and probability. They’ve done trigonometry with Randy Thomas, a state surveyor who showed them how to measure the distance between two points on the lake. They’ve put together small group presentations on real-world math situations, such as how to teach a lesson on linear equations using a Texas Instruments graphing calculator.

As Wood says, “One of the great things about this workshop is that we’ve helped a lot of people revisit mathematics that they may have used in the past but aren’t as articulate with because they haven’t been teaching it. And, we also brought in math that some of them have never seen before, like parametrics. Some of them knew it, some of them didn’t, but they’re all going to leave here feeling confident that they know something about it now, and if they need to know more they’ll feel confident about finding that information.”

Beyond this practical, hands-on experience with math, they will also have the long-term support to bring that knowledge into the classroom. “It’s systemic,” says Scott. “They’re not going to spend two weeks here and then leave and never see us again. It’s a yearlong process that they’ll be participating in.”

So often, Scott says, teachers are given raw information with no other support. “When you give professional development in short bursts what happens is that the teachers go back to work and they have all this information in a notebook,” she says. “But then it just gets put on a shelf and you never have another minute to look at it. If somebody isn’t there prodding you to use it, you don’t. You end up back doing things the way you’ve always done them.”

In the year ahead, the 23 teachers will revisit their action plans several times. The COMET directors will make site visits to each teacher to see how those plans are being implemented in the classroom. The teachers will videotape themselves teaching at least twice. They’ll give presentations at the school, district, and state level. They’ll attend two major conferences. They’ll be given monthly prompts that encourage reflection on their teaching practices. And then, next summer, they will make the journey down the winding road and past the dam to the little oasis by the lake, where one thing is certain: When they reflect on the year that has passed, they will know that they are more effective teachers than they were before. The COMET program is that rare thing—a professional development program that burns bright and stays with you forever.

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