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University of Wyoming

  

Building upon the Science and Mathematics Teaching Center’s (SMTC) traditions of service and provider of professional development, and enhancing its role as a resource for educators and research-based curriculum change, is the challenge that its new director has accepted.

   Kansas native Robert Mayes brings years of experience as a mathematics educator at the high school, community college and university levels to his new post. He also brings expertise developed while affiliated with programs focused on missions similar to the SMTC’s: researching and developing more approaches to teaching mathematics and science.  Along the way, Mayes has gained rich and varied experiences creating new programs, researching effective interventions, and engaging with peers across campus and across a region to achieve common goals.

   Many of the ongoing challenges that a rural state like Wyoming faces, and that an isolated institution like UW faces, are familiar to Mayes. Indeed, the opportunity to adapt what he has learned in other settings to Wyoming’s unique situation drew him to the SMTC.

   “The opportunities were there for integrated math/science, for integration of content with pedagogy, opportunities to reach teachers in a state that’s small enough to bring groups together,” Mayes says. “The smaller nature of Wyoming is a challenge, but it is also a strength.”

   Expertise with distance delivery of educational programs undoubtedly will prove an asset for the Center’s new leader, since most of its client base, K-12 teachers, is sitebound. While use of distance technologies-such as online platforms or videoconferencing-reduces the miles between participants, they do have limitations.

   “In math and science, some of the unique challenges to overcome via distance are the extreme visual nature, the symbolic nature, the hands-on experimental nature of the topic matter,” he notes, adding that technology constantly is improving and that software packages will continue to become more powerful.

   The SMTC relies on a diverse community of faculty members -- affiliated with the Colleges of Education, Arts and Sciences, Agriculture, and Engineering – to support programming.

   “I was so impressed by the list of affiliate faculty and what they’ve been doing,” Mayes says.

  A holistic approach to programming that draws from that varied expertise remains a high priority as Mayes looks to SMTC’s future.

   “We need to look at sustained, content-based professional development that approaches the whole realm of education – that addresses curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy,” he says.

   Assessment of student learning lies at the center of that process, according to Mayes.

   “If you do professional development and it’s not connected with curriculum or assessment, there won’t be meaningful change,” he says.

   In addition to connecting to national concerns about measuring student achievement, assessment helps to focus curriculum by identifying what is meaningful and what students should ultimately take away from the experience.

   “If you’re thinking as an assessor, you’re really asking yourself  ‘What should the significant outcomes be?’ The significant outcomes should be the enduring ideas,” Mayes says. “If you could start there, I think you could make some really important changes.”

   “The biggest single disconnect we probably have in the United States is that our teachers and our curriculum don’t do enough to determine what the big issues are, so we have a collection of ideas that are treated as if they are equally important,” he says. “We end up treating them as if they are all equally important. We then end up with rote learning and memorizing facts or algorithms and lists of the planets. We end up doing that instead of getting at three conceptual ideas that we would like them to know six months later.”

   Helping teachers learn to identify the critical ideas and to plan learning experiences that convey those ideas effectively will be important.

   “If you begin with what the enduring ideas are going to be, it presupposes that they understand the material well enough to realize that they have a deeper understanding of what those ideas should be,” Mayes adds. “That offers you the opportunity to do content-based professional development. Once they determine what those are, then you can start thinking about assessment tasks that address those issues.”