Exeter Math Institute shifts to virtual for 2020
Using breakout rooms and online whiteboards, public school teachers experience Harkness math. How was it? Eye-opening.
A PEA instructor and his students, middle- and high-school math teachers, calculate the length of the shadow of a person walking away from a lamppost. Elsewhere, another teacher asks rhetorically, “Would we all agree that this red line minimizes the distance between C and D prime?” In response, a teacher explains how her group arrived at a solution, quoting Albert Einstein: “It’s not that I’m so smart—it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
It’s this year’s Exeter Mathematics Institute. The summer workshop series, founded in 1992, brings the Harkness model to schools around the U.S. and Europe, flying in a small team of PEA math instructors for four days. What’s different is that like so much learning in 2020, this summer’s EMI took place in virtual classrooms. And thanks to generous donors, all of the EMI workshops were offered at no cost to participants.
A first for EMI
Though this summer’s session had been fully scheduled in January, it was scrapped when the pandemic hit. Yet school administrators and teachers kept reaching out to EMI Director Laura Marshall, asking if there was a way to carry on. So, together with Math Instructors John Mosley, Gwyn Coogan, Aviva Halani, Greg Spanier, Rachel Labes, David Huoppi and EMI founder Eric Bergofsky, when the PEA school year wrapped up, Marshall created EMI version 2.0. The teaching team initially focused on supporting school districts that had been planned pre-pandemic, but ended up adding a final session in August that was open to teachers anywhere in the country, a first for EMI. Marshall contacted previous attendees of the Anja S. Greer Conference on Mathematics and Technology, Exeter’s largest summer professional development conference, to spread the word about this new Virtual EMI open to all, and registration filled very quickly.
The sessions were successful thanks in part to an array of tools, including Zoom video conferencing, the Canvas learning platform, and Limnu, an online whiteboard. In the end, the only loss was the personal interactions—from getting to know each other over lunch to classroom conversations prompted by one group overhearing another’s approach to a problem.
Teaching resilience
“Our goals really haven’t changed much,” says Mosley of moving online. “We want to do a content refresh with the teachers, and we also want to introduce them to the Harkness style of teaching.”
Teachers in and around Atlanta, Kansas City, Palm Beach, Boston and Exeter attended remotely, with the exception of ten who were onsite in Kansas City. Teachers enrolled in one or two courses that met daily for three hours, with roughly a dozen in each. Classes began with a full-group discussion before teachers moved to breakout rooms in random groups of three or four to solve problems. Instructors circulated virtually among the groups to check progress.
“Sometimes they’d say, ‘Are we on the right track?’” says Labes. “I’d say, ‘What would you tell your students?’ And we’d have that conversation about how you help encourage your students to play with the problem. How do you help your students keep going, even if they’re not sure if they’re on the right track?”