SOE News

Deborah Michaels will defend her dissertation, Revising the Nation through Schooling: Citizenship and Belonging in Slovak Textbooks, 1918-2005, on Wednesday, August 5, 2009, at 3:00 p.m. in the Dean’s Conference Room (1211).

Eric Dey, professor of higher education, has accepted a faculty position to begin this fall at the University of Virginia. At the University of Virginia, Eric will direct a new university initiative focused on research on effective teaching in higher education. The program is intended to drive evidence-based improvements in the quality and impacts of teaching in higher education, beginning with work at the University of Virginia and then expanding the work nationally. We will miss Eric very much but it is an exciting opportunity for him, and is the next logical step in the work he’s been building over the last several years.  Early this fall, before he leaves, we will hold a reception for Eric to thank him for his contributions to SOE and to wish him farewell and best wishes for this new chapter of his life. Please join me in congratulating Professor Dey on this exciting new professional opportunity!

Magdalene Lampert

Magdalene Lampert, George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor in Education, has been awarded $103,522 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Learning Teaching project.

According to Lampert, “the aim of this project is to rethink how the learning of teaching might be organized so as to systematically and continuously promote simultaneously the development of individual expertise and the collective improvement of practice.  As we attempt to rethink the social organization of the learning of teaching, we want to understand more clearly how expertise develops in some organizations but not in others, and how its development, and passing it around and on, can be helped or hindered by particular ways of organizing the work of teaching and particular approaches to the teaching of practice.”

The Technology Services Group is beginning the annual computer upgrade cycle this week. Faculty and staff who are eligible for upgrades, generally those whose computers are four years old or older, will be contacted by email early next week. Our goal is to complete as many of the upgrades as possible by, or shortly after, the start of fall term.  Contact Technology Services Group by email or by phone (734-764-5427) with questions or concerns.

The Elementary Mathematics Laboratory (EML) will continue into its second and final week August 3-7.  Members of the SOE community are invited to view a live video stream during the second week.

The core of the EML is a mathematics class taught by Dean Deborah Ball for incoming fifth graders.  This mathematics class, as well as the subsequent debriefing session for observers, will be available via live video streams each weekday next week.  There will also be a chat room available.

The mathematics class begins each day at 9:15 a.m. promptly and ends at 11:30 a.m.  The debriefing session begins at 12:00 p.m. and ends near 1:00 p.m. Online visitors who wish to participate in the debriefing session will be able to ask questions and make comments that will be read aloud during the session by a moderator.

There is a $1 fee to participate.  More information, including technical requirements, can be found at  the EML2009 video streaming website.

You can also visit the EML in person by reserving a seat at: http://sitemaker.umich.edu/eml2009.

Please write to eml2009@umich.edu if you have any questions about using this service or have difficulty obtaining a ticket to view the event.

Lesley Rex

I am delighted to announce that Lesley Rex has been promoted to full professor.  Achieving this rank is the result of significant accomplishments, including a substantial body of scholarly work, excellence in teaching, and professional service on the school and campus. Please join me in congratulating Professor Rex on this important achievement!

The Board of Regents has approved the appointment of Annemarie Palincsar, Jean and Charles Walgreen Professor of Reading and Literacy and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor, to a full term as associate dean for academic affairs, continuing through July 2012. Professor Palincsar, who previously served as associate dean for graduate affairs from 2001-2004 as part of Dean Karen Wixson’s team, succeeds Professor Edward Silver, who served the school as the associate dean for academic affairs from July 2005 through the summer of 2008.  I am delighted to have Annemarie as part of the team in the dean’s office. We are fortunate to have her sharing the leadership of the school!

We have completed making faculty office-space assignments, including a number of significant changes for Educational Studies faculty.  We will distribute a new address list once the moves are completed.  Most will take place in the next month. I really appreciate the collective spirit and grace that all involved have shown!  I recognize how important space is to people for good reasons.

We are now working on allocating research space for 2009-10. This is more complicated this year as we seek to align our practice and principles with the university’s new guidelines for space use.  These guidelines suggest amounts and kinds of space to be assigned to whom and for what purposes, and connect research space allocations to external funding to cover the indirect costs of facilities and infrastructure. Although these are guidelines, not strict rules, they clearly differ from our past practice and call for changes in how we allocate research space.  In addition, we have some shifts within our own community this year as several School of Education faculty and research groups have garnered new funding that we must accommodate in order to make the work of funded projects possible.

It is also evident that our building has more space in it than we sometimes realize, but we are not using it as effectively as we need to.  There are several reasons for this.  One is that we have an old and oddly shaped and configured facility that is challenging to divide up sensibly.  A second is that we have, over time, built up uneven and inadequate criteria for space assignments.  And a third is that we have dedicated space to uses that warrant re-examination (e.g., storage).

As we make a transition to new principles and practices, we will make some changes this summer based both on the new university guidelines and on the work done by our own Research Advisory Committee.  For the longer-term SOE practice, we will have a broader discussion of space allocation and use early this fall.

The Elementary Mathematics Laboratory (EML) begins in our building on Monday, July 27, 2009.  The EML is in its third year at the School of Education, and its seventh overall. We hope in the next couple of years to be able to develop one or two teaching and learning laboratories in other subject areas and at different levels.  The core of the EML is a mathematics class for incoming fifth graders that takes place in Room 2229 every morning. Students in the class receive two and a half hours of math instruction each morning, and then, after lunch and supervised recreation, they participate in a music program, including work with instruments, led by instructors from the School of Music, Theater, and Dance. This an important component of the program, providing students with an expressive experience that complements their intense mathematics study.

They then return to work in a Mathematics Clinic (to be conducted between 2:30-3:30 each afternoon in the Tribute Room and the lounge), where they receive individual instruction by closely supervised tutors who are current University of Michigan undergraduate students. This component of the EML provides the children with additional assistance, tailored to their needs, while also providing university students majoring in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields with an opportunity to consider teaching.  For those already in our teacher education program, the clinic provides training in specific skills of teaching mathematics.

I was impressed with the broad interest that U-M undergraduates had in applying to be apprentice tutors in the math clinic.  We received almost twice as many applications as we had spots, from enthusiastically interested students in mathematics, engineering, economics, and business, as well as from our own students.

In addition we have several other programs operating in conjunction: Professor Hyman Bass is teaching a course for practicing mathematics teacher educators from around the country; Catherine Ditto, a mathematics educator from Chicago, is leading a professional development group for area teachers; and a group of Ypsilanti teachers who worked with the EML last summer, and continued to meet during the year, are returning this summer.  These components of the program will be taking place in various rooms on the second floor.  There will also be visitors from around the country for anywhere from a single day to the entire two-week period.

If you would like more information about any components of this program or would like to visit anytime during the next two weeks, please see information at http://sitemaker.umich.edu/eml2009/home.

I have returned from my third international trip in the last two months, this time to Greece where I participated in the annual meeting International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education.  My research team and I led a two-day research forum on the study of mathematical knowledge for teaching, in collaboration with colleagues in Cambridge University (UK), University of British Columbia (Canada), Oldenburg University (Germany), and the Weizmann Institute (Israel).  I also presented on a plenary invited panel on the role and nature of theory in mathematics education research.  It was a worthwhile and interesting conference.  It was also amazingly hot and sunny! I am glad to be home, and “grounded” until fall.