Grant enables students to explore math

Over the next three years the Indiana Department of Education will provide more than $1 million to continue the Greene County Math Advancement Partnership Project.

A collaboration of the IU School of Education, the IU Department of Mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences and five school corporations in Greene County, Ind., the project focuses on helping kindergarten through sixth-grade teachers learn new techniques for teaching math and is concluding an original two-year grant.

With the new grant of $1,103,548, the program will extend to teachers in grades four through eight.

“This new grant is the result of the collaborative effort of all five school corporations in the county, a collaborative effort that took shape in 2004,” said Shirley Byrer, co-director of the Greene County Grant and Professional Development Consortium, in an IU press release.

Breakthroughs in new techniques came over time, said Kevin Pilgrim, associate professor and associate dean of academic affairs for the IU School of Education at IUPUI, and the project’s extension will allow IU faculty to continue to build on the previous results they’ve seen with Greene County.

Through monthly meetings, Pilgrim said the program enabled teachers to discover new techniques themselves.

“They would listen to each other and Signe would point to someone across the classroom and say, ‘Hey did you understand what he said or she said?’ and make them explain it to each other,” Pilgrim said in the press release. “Through a very gradual process, we began to realize that it was OK for adults to talk about math just for the fun of it, to learn and explore ideas.”

Kathy Neill, a first-grade teacher at Bloomfield Elementary School, as well as other teachers, said in the press release that she feels better equipped to teach math effectively after undergoing the program.

“I expected the kids to follow along and get their little work papers and books and do it,” Neill said in the press release. “This has really changed my thinking. Now we’re letting kids explore math.”

Neill, along with partner Tara Sparks, a first-grade teacher at Eastern Greene Elementary School, demonstrated at a concluding session how they have “excited kids through games created with playing cards and dice.”

“The kids in my class have been taking them out at recess to play with them,” Sparks said in the press release. “They don’t want to put them down. They think of math as a game, not just sitting at their table writing on a piece of paper.”
   
— Bailey Loosemore