Presentation handout

This is a handout I often distribute at presentations.  It can be downloaded.  For more specific information on our course objectives, please email me.

MyMathLab demo now available for Math Lit

If you'd like to see what the MyMathLab course will look like for our book, Math Lit, you can preview it by creating a course in MyMathLab.  Go to "Create/Copy Course" and search by the book name or Almy or Foes.

Click on any graphic below to enlarge it for easier viewing.

Once it is copied, this is what you'll see.

We use MML for the skill component of the course so that students can practice all the skills that are developed in a way that will help them develop mastery.  Additionally, an ebook is available as well answers to the conceptual homework in the text.

To guide students through the book structure, tabs correlating to cycle parts are available, each with the set of steps students complete to learn a lesson.  They include participating in the lesson, doing MML homework, and doing conceptual homework with answers provided for checking their work.

Within the instructor resources is a link to the Instructor Appendix, a document that supports instructors in teaching the course, cycle, and lessons.  Additionally, there is a link to a webinar I gave about the MLCS course.

This and That: An Update

Although travel season never really ends for me, it does have its busy and less busy times.  I'm in the busy season now, traveling every weekend for the foreseeable future.  Recently I worked with the Maricopa college system in Phoenix on redesign.  It's interesting to see how large college systems work to implement change.  There are always challenges to redesign; they just vary due to things like size, funding, culture, and facilities.

I've been speaking at a series of three sessions to educate faculty in Illinois on new pathways courses.  We've had events at Southwestern Illinois College and Parkland College. Our remaining event is on March 2 from 10 am to 1 pm at College of DuPage.  Any faculty or administrator in Illinois is welcome to attend and learn more about the types of pathways courses we're testing in Illinois, the data to date, and when we'll be voting as a state.

Intermixed with the Illinois events, I'm speaking on MLCS in Houston this week for TCCTA.  Next month I'll be in Washington state (both Seattle and Spokane) for events to talk about pathways courses.  Then it's on to ICTCM in Boston and then IMACC at Robert Allerton Park in Monticello, IL.

Throughout this time, I'm doing training workshops with schools as they plan pilots.  Heather and I are working on the online course we'll teach on pathways this summer.  Information for registration should be coming in the next month or so.  Communication is often easier with face-to-face workshops, but it's hard to be everywhere at once.  The online course will give us an opportunity to provide training for MLCS on a much larger scale and in the convenience of your own home.

Lastly, we are in the home stretch of finishing the book, Math Lit.  A demo course in MyMathLab will be available very soon.  We've already seen a sample of it and it's fantastic.

It's been a lot of work for me and many, many others around the country who are committed to providing new developmental math avenues for students.  Seeing that work come to fruition is truly exciting.  Hearing about students enjoying new courses and feeling success in a math class for the first time makes all of it worthwhile.

New website for the book, Math Lit

Pearson has created a website for the book, Math Lit.  You can check it out here.  More information will be added to the site this spring.

Exciting News for MLCS and Math Lit!

We're back in the swing of things at our school, entering our second week of the semester and our fourth semester of piloting MLCS.  Things are never dull on the pathways front.  I'm waiting for more information that I'll post soon on the blog, but until then, here's a sneak peek:

Online MLCS Training

Heather and I will be teaching an online course this summer about teaching pathways courses like MLCS.  It will be 4 weeks and in June.  If you're thinking about teaching MLCS but want much more detailed help and the chance to talk to other educators in the same boat, this course is for you.  Plus, you don't have to travel!  This will be a great opportunity for faculty or administrators prior to a pilot or for schools who want a more detailed look at pathways courses than a webinar or presentation can provide.  

Registration information will be posted on the blog soon.

If there is interest, we will teach the online course on a regular basis.  I'm very grateful to be asked to do this by a company that can facilitate online classes like this.  Doing so allows us to offer the training on a large scale that we have heard so many requests for.  We will continue to do face-to-face workshops but it is hard to reach all the schools who want more help.  The online course will help that issue greatly.

We are committed to making MLCS possible at any school and have worked to make that happen through education, materials, training, and support.  Schools that class test with our materials are eligible for webinars with Heather and me to get their questions answered and brainstorm solutions to challenges.

Would you be interested in a discussion board about MLCS and/or the Math Lit book?  Email me or post in the comments if you are.  I can set up a discussion board that would be free and allow us to have an ongoing dialogue and resource for schools.

More to come soon!

Overcoming Obstacles: Making an MLCS Pilot Happen

In a perfect world, we as faculty could create and modify courses as needed to support student learning and success.  But we don't live in that world.  Instead, we are challenged to find solutions for students and then challenged again when we try to implement those solutions.

Here are some common obstacles that come up when trying to pilot a Math Literacy course and some ideas for overcoming them.  All of the ideas shared are above board and do not ignore the rules in place.  I'm a big believer in following the rules and learning ways to work within them.  Some schools are saying they are teaching intermediate algebra but really are piloting MLCS instead.  I don't advise doing that.  It could backfire in a big way in terms of your state regulations and articulation.

1.  Intermediate algebra

Many states, including mine, have a requirement of intermediate algebra before college level courses.  Some states are beginning to allow alternative courses in an attempt to see if they can be successful.  If you are not lucky enough to be in one of those states, here are some things you can try:

a.  Create a large enough course in terms of credit hours and content, making sure all the big ideas from intermediate algebra are addressed.  This means including factoring, quadratics, exponentials, rational functions, and radical functions.  That's not to say that you need to teach all those topics the way we do in intermediate algebra.  Otherwise, what's the point of the course?  But you can show students the typical intermediate algebra topics in a different light, one that focuses on modeling and concepts and applications.

b.  If that's still not enough to get approval for a pilot, go around that intermediate algebra requirement with placement.  Placement is something that nearly every school is in control of.  Use that to your advantage.  We started our pilot with making every student in the course take the placement test at the beginning of the course and at the end.  The data was quite interesting.  Many students placed into college algebra and those who didn't were close.  Our school is contemplating a different placement cutoff for liberal arts math and statistics anyway since being at the college algebra level on the placement test is not necessary for success in those two courses.  It's only necessary for college algebra and precalculus.  That new cutoff would be just slightly less than the college algebra cutoff, similar to how we use ACT scores.  If you have a specific placement cutoff for stats and liberal arts math, you can verify that students passing the course meet that placement number using the exit placement test.  And even if you don't have a special cutoff score, you can still use the placement test at the end.

This approach allows students to use the Math Literacy course as basically a bridge to non-STEM college level math.  They take the course and then retake the placement test.  If your state won't allow the course as entry to statistics or liberal arts math, the placement test result can.  This approach allows you to pilot but still follow state rules.

2.  Faculty opposition

Sometimes faculty in your department will be skeptical that standards will be reduced or students will not be prepared for the outcome courses.  But the reality is they don't know that for a fact.  The data will bear out the truth.  In this situation, ask for a pilot with the stipulation of gathering data and re-evaluating the course after 2 years.  It takes that long to teach the course and track the students after it.  Some faculty, especially ones in math, need hard data to convince them.  Still, some folks just don't like something different than algebra, even if students perform well in the next course.  That kind of emotional reaction is very hard to address because it's not based on facts or logic.

Another suggestion is to make the course an option and not a requirement in your department.  That allows students and faculty who believe in the course to be a part of it and those that don't, aren't.

3.  Factoring

Of all the traditional topics, this one creates the most conversation and conflict.  Fundamentally, many instructors believe students should learn to factor.  Here are the most common cases and what can be done:

a.  Faculty are concerned that students won't be ready for a traditional intermediate algebra class after MLCS if they don't learn all the factoring techniques.  The reality is that students who pass beginning algebra aren't even ready for using factoring in intermediate algebra.  We as educators like to think if we've taught a topic, that it equates to students learning the topic.  But that's just not the case all the time.  Many beginning algebra students still need massive amounts of review of factoring when they go into intermediate algebra, even if it's just a few weeks later.  We saw this firsthand in our redesign.  We tried to address factoring "just-in-time" in intermediate algebra and it never worked.  We saw our intermediate algebra pass rates soar once we added in intermediate algebra as a unit and just taught it directly.  All the students benefited.

So my suggestion in this case is to add factoring to your intermediate algebra class if it's not.  And if it is, it will be enough to help an MLCS student succeed.  Most students moving from MLCS to a STEM path are stronger academically.  That lurking variable matters and benefits the issue greatly.  And nearly all of these students have seen factoring before intermediate algebra.  Remember, because we teach algebra so early in U.S., most students have seen 3-5 years of algebra prior to starting developmental math.

b.  The other concern faculty have is the idea of removing an old standby.  Even if factoring is not useful, many instructors believe we should teach it for historical reasons and for critical thinking.  First, students are not getting the brain exercise we like to think with factoring.  The are ways to make students work hard and think critically AND learn content that will help them in the next course.  We don't have to do topics just for the sake of mental exercise.  We also don't have the luxury of time to do that anyway in MLCS.

But doing something just because we always have doesn't make sense.  My father is a retired math professor.  He knows how to calculate square roots by hand and use a slide rule, but I don't.  I learned trig with trig tables and stats with stats tables, but my students know neither.  Times change and so does content.  100 years ago, a college student had to know Latin to graduate.  We laugh at that now, but at one time it was considered essential to being college educated.  Again, times change, and mathematics education has to evolve with those changes.  We have precious little time with students and need to prepare them for their next course and college in general.  If a topic is not going to serve those goals, it needs to re-evaluated for inclusion in a course.


These are some of the big obstacles and some ideas.  Hopefully they will help some.  If you've tried something that worked and helped you gain a pilot, please share in the comments or send me an email.

MLCS: Where's the math?

MLCS is a very different course, whether you're looking at the materials, the content development, the class structure, or the homework.  Every aspect of the course is different than the traditional algebra courses that are common in all developmental math programs.  Those differences are exciting and lead to great gains in understanding and mathematical maturity for students.  I'm so impressed with what students can do when we get to this point in the semester.  But change is hard.  

Einstein said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."  To get to the point we want students to be at the end of the math literacy course, which is college readiness, we use very different approaches.  And they do work, but they do not look like what instructors expect, especially in terms of the printed page.  For example, I taught a lesson today that started with reviewing linearity and building a model, then moved into solving literal equations, and concluded with factoring the GCF.  All of this worked together in the context of building a model and then working with the most useful and simple form of it.  Everything had a purpose, but nothing was easy.  Beyond that, those topics never appear together in an algebra book.  But they need to if we want students to see connections.  And while that mix of topics may be strange to us as instructors, it can make sense when solving a bigger problem.

College readiness is more than a skill set, but possessing the ability to use that skill set.  To get students there, we use open-ended problems each unit.  This unit, we're having students work on problems framed around the question, "how big is big?"  We want students to grasp the largeness or smallness of numbers in a variety of settings.  We ask students questions like, "could you carpet the U.S. with its own debt if it was in $1 bills?"  $16 trillion is a large number but how large is it really?  Putting it in perspective helps to make sense of it.  That idea is pervasive in real life.  I just used an example:  $16 trillion instead of $16,000,000,000,000.  Writing "trillion" allows me to work with a number that's more manageable:  16.

We ask students to take the U.S. debt and find its weight in quarters, its height if it was stacked in $1 bills, its area, etc.  But the numbers are enormous, so we ask students to make a comparison that's useful and helpful.  To make this idea and goal concrete, we use the example of blue whales, the largest mammal.  But how big are they?  We could find their length or weight but those are just large numbers.  So put them in perspective.  This interactive app provides a great demonstration.  For me, seeing that a blue whale is the length of a basketball court is really illuminating.

This unit project has an amazing amount of math in it to be solved.  Students have to work with scientific notation, dimensional analysis, concepts from geometry as well as do research on quantities and find objects of comparable size to make comparisons against.  If you want a fun challenge, find the weight of the U.S. debt in quarters and then something on the earth to make sense of that number.  It's not a trivial exercise.

Like the quarter problem, the entire open-ended problem description is brief and there are no mathematical symbols in it.  But to complete the project takes pages of calculations and research.  That isn't how we typically provide "word problems" to students because it's really hard for students to complete.  We don't provide short statements and tell the students to figure it out.  As educators, we want to make math accessible so we try to find ways through problems, be it decoding word problems or finding key words or recognizing problem 'types.'  That approach is full of good intentions but the outcome is a student who can't really solve problems.  Students can often mimic their way through, but true understanding is not often gained.  It's like we've left the training wheels on the bike and then expect students to ride without them.  If they never have to ride on their own, we shouldn't be surprised when they can't.

As with the project description, there are lessons throughout the book we've written that are devoid of symbols, at first glance.  Take a look at this page from the manuscript:














It begs the questions, "where's the math?"  Take a look after students complete the lesson:

Like the national debt problem, students start with few words and a problem to solve.  But getting there requires a serious amount of work.  The mathematics is evident and abundant but it was not given to students but instead created by students.
The level of expectation is higher and so is the difficulty level.  But the understanding is deeper.  Students move past skills alone and work to use those skills without constant prompting on when or how.  Not easy, but the payoff is greater.

A colleague of mine said years ago when we began redesigning our developmental math program, "what we're doing is good, but I wish we could do more mathematics with students."  I just looked at him puzzled because what else are we doing with them in an algebra class if not mathematics?  But I understand his point now.  Doing mathematics is rich and complicated and messy and often, circuitous.  Algebra is neat and linear and simplified to a set of procedures.  Do we need those procedures?  Absolutely.  But focusing on them alone is akin to learning all the scales in music.  If we never move past the scales and into the songs, how can we say we've made music?