September 30, 2005 == MEDIA ADVISORY
A $198,407 grant from the Michigan Department of Education will allow Calvin
College mathematics professor Jan Koop to improve math education in three Grand
Rapids-area schools.
The two-year, Title II "Improving Teacher Quality Grant" will allow Koop to
conduct workshops and provide other incentives for teachers at Alexander and
Shawnee Elementary schools and Oakdale Christian School.
Anita Watson-Phillips, the math curriculum supervisor for the Grand Rapids
Public Schools (GRPS), is excited about the grant.
"I'm happy to be working with Jan Koop," she says, "and I know that the math
programs at Calvin teach math in such a way that this will be beneficial to
students' progress. One of the concerns we've had is so many teachers have been
taught to teach math as computational procedure, when we really need students
to understand the concepts of math. This collaboration will help us give
teachers that background in math content and pedagogy that they might not have
had before."
Koop says that the job of a math teacher has become much more complicated than
it used to be.
"Math teaching now," she says, "includes geometry, statistics, probability,
algebra - and that's not an exclusive list. But those are things that are state
mandated and important concepts in mathematics."
Koop is hoping to equip teachers to teach not only the mechanics of math, but
also the mathematical underpinnings of addition, subtraction, multiplication
and division.
"We want them to understand deeply - and have their students understand deeply
- the concepts behind the mathematics," she says. "Instead of teaching them 35
little factoids, we want them to understand the whole mathematical structure."
This is the second collaboration between Calvin and the GRPS funded by an
"Improving Teacher Quality Grant." Last year, a $179,000 grant allowed Calvin
education professor James Rooks to pioneer a program to support the Four Block
literacy model - the GRPS' adopted method of teaching reading and writing.
For the complete story see
http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2005_06/koop_grant.htm
Contact Koop at 616-526-6467 or kooj@calvin.edu
-end-
Received on Thu Sep 29 23:00:09 2005
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