News

Earlier this spring, members from the GRIP lab (Mike Ion, Irma Stevens, Inah Ko) and some members from the GeT: A Pencil community (Steve Boyce, Julia St. Goar, Ruthmae Sears) organized a working group called “Teaching Geometry for Secondary Teachers” in Boston, MA at the 2022 Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education to convene with attendees who teach or do research on college geometry courses taken by secondary teachers. The conference was in hybrid format, so we were able to hold a working group with members joining both online and in-person to promote the work. 

In the first portion of the working group, Steve Boyce presented on the development and stewardship of a set of Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) for geometry courses that has been worked on by the Teaching GeT online working group throughout the last year. These have been identified as the content knowledge that all prospective secondary geometry teachers should have the opportunity to learn.

In the next portion, Mike Ion and Irma Stevens led a session where participants looked at items created by the GRIP lab aimed at assessing students on the SLOs. Participants were asked to comment on the items, providing their insights on the goals and content of the items. 

In the last portion, Steve Boyce with the help of Julia St. Goar and Ruthmae Sears represented his teaching of the “Adinkra lesson” and the learning the Transformations Working Group has done with their lesson study that has now been taught three times in various settings. The purpose of the lesson is to foster normative precision in describing and defining geometric transformations, including symmetries, and to foster dispositions to attend to prospective students’ mathematical identities. They call it the “Adinkra” lesson since they have students mathematically analyze Adinkra symbols originating from Ghana.

Boston Harbor (picture taken by Irma)	Boa Me Na Me Mmoa Wo Adinkra symbol.