Sunday, July 11, 2010

Statway lesson protocol

Thursday afternoon and Friday morning (July 8 – 9, 2010) Pierce College math faculty Vic LaForest, Bob Martinez, Kathy Yoshiwara, and I were in a “fishbowl” as part of the development of the Statway project.

In the coming year, faculty teams from 19 community college campuses will take materials (developed by the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching) and create, test, analyze effectiveness of, and give feedback on statistics lessons. The purpose of our two-day experience was to test out a protocol developed for carrying out this process.

The lead facilitator was Bill Saunders, formerly of Pearson Learning Teams. He was joined by UCLA research colleagues Jim Stigler and Karen McGivven, Kris Bishop of the Dana Center (UT Austen), and Alicia Grunow of Carnegie.

We were not allowed to see the proto-lesson until we met Thursday. After a brief introduction to the protocol and the Statway lesson approaches, we four faculty members spent much of the afternoon working among ourselves deciding how we could best implement that lesson, while a video camera and the observers watched on.

We were expected to have the lesson design completed before our 5:30 pm adjournment Thursday. Bob was chosen to deliver the lesson at the start of the Friday session, and Karen volunteered to acquire the materials needed for our modified lesson. Kathy and I agreed to put together and email some of the materials Bob would need for his handouts.

Bob was working until 2:00 am putting together the materials.

Our Pierce College deans Jacquinita Rose and Crystal Kiekel were attending as guests. But when only 3 students showed up from the 8 students that had been recruited for Friday morning, we put Crystal and Alicia to work, enlisting them to act as students for Bob's lesson.

Bob did a great job running the lesson. After the students departed with their $20 iTunes gift cards, we continued the lesson protocol with the debriefing of how the lesson went, analyzing the student work, and writing feedback on the lesson.

The researchers were pleased with how everything went, and promised we would not be seeing the videos on YouTube.