- Year 2024
- NSF Noyce Award # 2243465
- First Name Aaron
- Last Name Brakoniecki
- Registration Faculty/Administrator/Other
- Discipline Mathematics
- Role Principal Investigator (PI)
- Presenters
Aaron Brakoniecki, Boston University
Need
Boston University’s Joy and Justice in Math Teaching and Learning (J-Squared Math) seeks to address the need for preparing highly effective mathematics teachers who are properly trained in facilitating meaningful mathematical discourse in the classroom while simultaneously increasing students’ critical consciousness of issues of racism and other social injustices. This program is a collaboration of mathematics education faculty in the Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development, mathematics faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences at BU, and three local school districts. The J-Squared program provides an experience-rich and inquiry-based teacher preparation program that addresses the recommendations from the MET II Report, the CCSS-M and is responding to the critical demand for highly trained middle and high school mathematics teachers in high-need school districts in the state of Massachusetts. The project makes it possible for STEM professionals to become educators by providing full scholarships to qualified students.
Research Questions
The J-Squared program is built around an established Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) degree program that emphasize pedagogical content knowledge in mathematics and features courses that emphasize mathematical knowledge for teaching. Scholars also attend workshops, seminars and mentoring that address supporting the scholars to create more inclusive and equitable classrooms that emphasize mathematics ability to provide joy and justice to students.The goals of the project are as follows: (1) Recruit highly talented STEM majors and STEM professionals to teach secondary mathematics in high-need schools; (2) Develop secondary mathematics teachers’ mathematical knowledge for teaching with a specific focus on teaching math for social justice, and (3) Retain highly talented secondary mathematics teachers who teach in high-need schools.
Approach
Scholars are connected to a robust and on-going mathematics community of students, teachers, mathematics educators, and mathematicians. They return to campus throughout the year for professional development. During seminars, they have begun to engage with ideas around teaching mathematics for social justice, including topics focused on complex instruction, cognitively demanding tasks, issues of status in the classroom, and working with English language learners. Other professional development activities for scholars include summer workshops focused on engineering design, attendance at conferences, special meetings for first year teachers focused on classroom management, and activities during the MAT year specifically oriented toward working in high-need schools.
Outcomes
This project has highlighted the the ways in which engineering, and specifically the engineering design process, can be utilized and leveraged to connect with the mathematics practice standards. We were able to receive a no-cost extension for another year and will fund 5 additional scholars on this project and continue our Noyce Seminar Series. Lastly, we have collected tasks and student work from two years of our scholars that we plan to analyze so that we will have some evidence of the curricular tasks our students and graduates are using in their classrooms, as well as a sampling of their own students’ work on these tasks.
Broader Impacts
This summer we will be admitting the first scholars into this new project. We have continued offering our seminar series to our scholars from a prior project and focused the topics of this seminar series on complex instruction, and an equity-centered approach to mathematics instruction. Our prior project with a focus on discourse and curriculum (of which many of those scholars will continue attending the seminars of this current project) featured a total of 29 scholars across six cohorts, with almost all of them continuing to teaching mathematics in high-need districts beyond their requirement as part of the Noyce program.
