More on innovative practices outside of New York City: Just came across this report on the Fund for Teachers website.



Fund for Teachers is an agency which, among many things, provides $5,000 travel grants to teachers looking do professionally enriching research. Many of the grant proposals are total boondoggles -- visiting the islands (and beaches and cafés) of Greece to get of better sense of the locations depicted in the Odyssey, say. As I was told in a recent information session, the Fund believes that anything that rejuvenates and inspires a teacher's classroom practice is justifiable just so as long as teacher can supply a good story and the receipts to account for the monies spent.

This proposal, however, appears to come from a teacher in a similar predicament as the ones writing for the CCC Blog. Eager get away from mere mathematical test prep curriculum to one focusing cognitively demanding tasks, the teacher, from the Bushwick School of Social Justice, secured the travel funds to visit various conferences dedicated to novel teaching methods and several west coast community college districts purporting to be on the cutting edge of instructional innovation where mathematics is concerned.

As the teacher notes in the after-action report, however, the community college world has its own grant-biased language problem. What started out as an effort to observe "innovative instructional practices" at work to turned into a due diligence exercise in B.S.-detection.

"I went into this journey expecting to be wowed by innovative mathematics teaching practices happening in different community college settings. Instead, I was stunned by the realities of what is not happening," writes the report's author. "A math class at North Seattle Community College purportedly addressed students’ anxieties about math in addition to working on skills. But, when I sat in on that class and talked to the professors who taught it, I saw nothing but traditional, rote teaching. Yet, in Portland, where they were not claiming to do anything that radical, I encountered a network of educators truly empowering their students and promoting authentic growth."

As the report goes on to state, the teacher, who describes herself as "ignorant and idealistic" at the time of the proposal's writing, hasn't lost her initial idealism. What has happened, however, is that she has come way with a more realistic awareness of how difficult it is to seek change in system which in which the easiest thing to do is do things the way they've always been done and simply slap a new name on the effort.

"I leave this fellowship committed to prioritizing the types and frequency of the questions I use, the worthiness of the tasks I ask students to tackle, and a curriculum rich with real world thinking," she writes.