EMATHS StoryCircles was a Michigan’s Mathematics and Science Partnership (MSP) Program in which Macomb ISD carried out the professional development with secondary mathematics teachers across Michigan who were familiar with the EMATHS curriculum. The subcontract to the GRIP lab allowed us to support the work of the EMATHS facilitators and participants by providing participant assessment, facilitator coaching, and technological support . To engage secondary inservice teachers in a practice-based mode of professional development, the EMATHS facilitators implemented a process designed at the GRIP lab called LessonSketch StoryCircles. StoryCircles is a facilitated process of collaboratively representing a lesson using a multimedia storyboarding tool (Depict) within the LessonSketch platform. We used a blended model of professional development to support this process, including two yearly face-to-face meetings, six synchronous videoconferences, and some 40 hours of online forum interactions that used forums in the LessonSketch platform. The GRIP’s staff mentored two EMATHS facilitators in the use of the StoryCircle process, provided support to the teacher participants in the use of the storyboarding technology, administered teachers’ assessments using the LessonSketch platform, scored and analyzed those assessments, and provided hotline technology support to users. By analyzing participants’ interactions with the process and one another, researchers in the GRIP lab were able to learn about the potential of StoryCircles for developing teachers’ mathematical knowledge of teaching and improving their instructional practices as well as consider ways to improve the StoryCircles process for future cohorts.

The EMATHS StoryCircles project was premised on the notion that in order to support Michigan’s students in gaining proficiency in the Michigan Standards for Mathematics, Michigan’s teachers needed support in gaining deeper mathematical knowledge for teaching as well as making shifts to their instructional practices. The Macomb ISD in partnership with the GRIP provided practice-based professional learning experiences focused on implementation of the EMATHS activities for 16 secondary mathematics teachers serving within 6 different schools across Macomb, Huron, and Ingham counties. Teachers started their collective work in a full day face-to-face professional learning experiences to orient participants to the project and one another. After that, participants worked within one of four StoryCircles groups focused on either algebra 1 or geometry, participating in monthly video-conference meetings and private online multimedia forums within LessonSketch to collectively generate representations of EMATHS lessons, implement those lessons with their own students, share artifacts (e.g. students’ written work) from their implementation, and refine those lesson representations based on their collective experiences. Each StoryCircles group developed, implemented, and refined 4 EMATHS lesson representations to contribute to a library of EMATHS lessons representing tasks from EMATHS units. This library was developed to forward the work of these and other teachers around the state with EMATHS implementation. The project concluded with a face-to-face meeting in which teachers reviewed the created materials and selected four that best represented the kinds of instructional practices needed for implementing EMATHS tasks. Over the summer, EMATHS facilitators and participants worked collectively to refine those four lessons for public release in the EMATHS lesson library.

Click on the following accordions to view each of the different developed EMATHS lessons.

Publications related to this project