Year 1: Our Teaching Culture & Practice

Much of the work of the TIPS Pathway must be facilitated by STEM education professionals with appropriate expertise and with some distance from the department. We consider external facilitators to be essential to a successful Pathway implementation. 

Summer Equity Workshop: Understanding our Students' Experience

The year 1 work around equity starts with a four-day intensive Workshop held right before the beginning of the semester. To learn about students’ experiences around marginalization and belonging in the department, the PD facilitators conducted surveys and focus groups with students in year 0. Informed by this data, the Equity Workshop centers around four main elements:

• Examination. A Critical examination of the impact of race, gender, and identity on the practice of doing and teaching mathematics and STEM in general.
• Acknowledgement. Participants are challenged to acknowledge their role in perpetuating systematic marginalization of particular groups of students. This marginalization comes through the modalities of race, gender, bias, stereotype threat and other marginalized identities.
• Power and Purpose.  Participants Investigate the various ways in which they have power in their classrooms and within stem spaces over students. This leads to investigations about the nature of our purpose as professionals, colleagues, faculty members, and teachers.
• Immediate action -  with a clear purpose and a realization of the power that they have, participants are asked to reimagine the everyday practices and policies they use within their classroom.  Armed with knowledge about the impact of race,  gender and identity in STEM educational spaces and imbued by an acknowledgement of their role in the systemic inequities participants build community around doing Equity audits in their individual classes and in the department in general.

Fall check-ins: Connecting with students

The summer workshop is followed by semi-monthly check-ins with participants throughout the fall semester to get a gauge of how their semester is going and how they are implementing some of the new practices and policies that they came up with during the four-day workshop.  The semi-monthly sessions are a way of holding participants accountable to make the changes that are needed.

Winter workshop: Rehumanizing STEM, Culturally Responsive Practices, & Lesson Study launch

In the 3-day winter workshop, taking place before the start of the spring semester, participants are introduced to the Rehumanizing Mathematics/STEM framework (Gutiérrez), culturally responsive practices, and lesson study.

Participants come to understand the theoretical conceptions of Rehumanizing Mathematics/STEM that situate harm to particular people as the impetus for changing our practice and for reimagining a more meaningful and humane future driven by participants. Part of this work includes developing deeper understandings of the dimensions through specific examples of Rehumanizing Mathematics/STEM and opportunities to reflect on our practice. Such work is important if we are going to move beyond merely tinkering, or beyond helping students “survive” STEM, so that we can support students to thrive.

Together, participants envision and carry out collective practice that centers Latinx students. This work involves identifying specific areas of the mathematics/science curriculum ripe for change that can deepen interpersonal relationships (faculty-faculty, faculty-student, student-student) and a commitment to collective action.  Collective practice requires moving beyond an individual teacher focus and engaging in collective planning, action, and reflection.

Groups of faculty are introduced to the practice of Lesson Study and start initial planning for a joint lesson study project to be carried out in the spring. Lesson Study is an inquiry cycle that supports teachers to experiment, observe and improve. As teachers work together to study student learning, schools become places where both students and teachers are passionate about learning (https://lessonresearch.net/). In the TIPS Pathway, lesson study is an important mechanism to work on classroom practice in a very detailed way.

Spring Lesson Study

During the Spring semester of Pathway Year 1, participants choose or are assigned to teams of about 5, each team working in a specific focus class. Each team identifies some equity and belonging goals, chooses a typically-difficult idea in the class, and designs a lesson. One member of the team then teaches the lesson with the others observing (in person or on video) for both equity goals and student content learning. They then revise the lesson based on the evidence they collected, and another team member will teach it to another class of students; then a final revision and brief presentation to the entire TIPS cohort (and, if desired, other interested community members) at an on-campus Lesson Study Conference towards the end of the semester.

Not all members of the team need to be teaching the target class in the Year 1 Spring semester, but at least two members should be, if possible. Lesson Study teams begin their work during the Year 1 January TIPS workshop, choosing equity theme(s) and content goals.

Time expectations (Approximately 20 hours beyond January workshop). All times are very approximate:

• Planning meetings (8 hours)
• Pre-conference, observe, debrief (4 hours, times 2)
• Final revision meeting (2 hours)
• Prepare and present  at TIPS Lesson Study Conference (2 hours)