Measuring Up: An Elementary School Experience is a continuation of an earlier teacher-enhancement, reform based project that began in 1997 with middle school teachers. This continuation phase of the Eisenhower Professional Development Project involves 26 elementary school and 5 middle mathematics teachers in DeKalb, Illinois. The project is co-directed by Dr. Helen Khoury and Dr. DianaSteele, mathematics educators at Northern Illinois University Department of Mathematical Sciences.
The goal of Measuring Up is to continue to engage elementary and middle school teachers and their students in solving a varietyof problems where mathematics is applied to solve real-world based problems. Making mathematics meaningful, enjoyable, and alive is our ultimate goal.
The 26 elementary school teachers and the 5 middle school teachers, who acted as mentors based on their prior experiences with Measuring Up, participated in a variety of activities during the in-service group meetings which involved problem-solving, discussion and comparison of various problem-solving strategies, discussion of children's ways of mathematical thinking, and group discussions and reflections on research based readings. The participants reflected through journal writing about the in-service group meeting experiences, their own classroom teaching practices, and assigned research based readings.
The teachers used these experiences to build related activities to help enhance their students' pre-algebraic and geometric-based thinking. Each teacher teamed up with a colleague and collaborated to develop a lesson, team taught this lesson to each of their classes, and reported their experiences and samples of students work to the other project participants and staff. A mentor and a project staff member participated during this process.
The problems used in this project focused on enhancing the teachers algebraic and geometric based thinking. The problems were conceptually linked and centered on common themes of fraction concepts, numerical, algebraic, and geometric pattern finding, functions, and concepts of probability. Samples of a few of the real world problems that were developed by the project staff to engage the teachers in a enjoyable and mathematically meaningful way are provided:
Come join us for a pictorial journey of the project. Pictorial snapshots of the teachers engaged in the in-service activities during the project are provided.
The staff of this project are research literate mathematics education professionals who collaborated with DeKalb School District #428, DeKalb, Illinois to make this project possible. The staff worked together as a closely knit team.
| Project Co-Directors: | Dr. Helen A. Khoury & Dr. Diana Steele |
| Support Staff: Dr. Ellen Hines Bharath Sriraman Ruba Miqdadi |
The external project evaluators consisted of Dr. Rich Wyllie and Mrs. Kathy Lehuta. Both are professional mathematics educators and experienced classroom teachers.
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