Looking in the mirror: What will we look like at 25?

At the risk of making this column too much about me, I remember a few things about what I looked like at 25. (First and foremost, I had hair.) I was completing my third year in the classroom, working and struggling to enact the open-ended student-centered mathematics teaching I wanted to provide my students. I was seeking out professional development opportunities beyond my district and beginning to run workshops inside the district. I was fumbling around with technologies to better engage my students, trying to get them talking to one another, losing as many battles as I won but enjoying the campaign. And when I was not doing that, I was moonlighting as a professional musician, directing musicals, and tutoring friends in healthcare struggling with a statistics course. Half a lifetime later, I would have never predicted what life would look like today: five jobs, four states, one amazing family, and countless formative experiences later.

Next February (2021), the AMTE conference will turn 25. What will the experience look like? What voices will be heard? What will be familiar, and what will be new? In this column, I reflect on our experience in Phoenix and look forward to our 25th conference and beyond.

I would like to thank everyone who was able to be with us to put on an amazing conference last month in Phoenix. Whether you presented, attended, coordinated, socialized, conspired, agreed, dissented, tweeted, blogged, pondered, sang, danced, or all of the above, you helped to make the conference an amazing interactive experience for everyone involved. I want to thank Kathryn Chval and Nico Gomez for giving us amazing and provocative issues to think deeply about in the Opening Session, and to express my appreciation for everyone who continued that conversation late into the evening. I want to recognize Trena Wilkerson and the Conference Committee, AnnaMarie Conner and the Program Committee, and Mi Yeon Lee, Terri Kurz, and their Local Arrangements Committee for their tireless work in bringing our shared experience to life. I’d like to recognize Paola Sztajn for her Judith Jacobs Lecture that deftly blended scholarly work with critical human elements. And I especially want to thank each and every one of you who took the time to provide us feedback on what AMTE is doing that you value, suggested directions for us to go next, and provided us with important critical feedback to shape the future of the organization.

As we cast our gaze forward from Phoenix to Orlando and the future, there are a number of critical questions facing our organization. How do we advocate for the work of mathematics teacher education in the face of challenges related to mathematics teacher education enrollments? How do we turn recruitment and retention into attraction and engagement of our candidates? What stakeholders in mathematics teacher education do we not have at the table, and how do we welcome them into our spaces and our discourses? How do we keep the best of AMTE while continually seeking to grow, change, and improve?

Last year, the Board of Directors established a set of strategic priorities to guide the next two years of work. A reminder of those priorities are below. Our focus in enacting those priorities is to listen to the organization and needs, create a strategic plan that charts a course for our future, and identifying and carrying out goals that move us forward.

AMTE Priorities for 2019-2020

1. Explore multiple avenues for AMTE members to recognize and address inequities, building toward equitable practices.

2. Identify and engage a broader constituency for AMTE.

3. Engage membership in strategic planning for the organization.

To accomplish this, our organization will engage in a three-phase process to develop a long-term strategic plan that will carry AMTE through the next five years. We began this first phase in Phoenix with the efforts to collect feedback from all of you about what’s working with AMTE, what needs to change, and where we think we should direct our efforts in our 1,000-member volunteer organization. The timing of these three phases is noted below.

Phase 1: February-April 2020

Needs Assessment and Membership Engagement

Phase 2: May-July 2020

Create long-term goals

Phase 3: August-December 2020

Create action plan for the next 12-18 months of activity

If you weren’t in Phoenix, we missed you, and we’re committed to hearing your voice! At the Business Meeting, we invited discussion and written feedback on the four questions below. We would love to hear your ideas on these questions and some of the other prompts we provided at the conference. If you weren’t with us, or even if you were and have more to say, please go to this link and share your thoughts with us between now and April. If you’d like us to follow up with you, leave a name and email address and we’ll be in touch.

1. What do you see as the most significant challenges facing mathematics teacher education in the next 5-10 years?

2. What actions would you like to see AMTE take in the short term (12-18 months) to better support members and address challenges?

3. What actions would you like to see AMTE take in the long term (3-5 years) to better support members and address challenges?

4. Are there things that AMTE should not take on or should stop doing to better focus on the current needs of our membership?

Finally, I want to recognize the extraordinary colleagues with whom I’ve had the fortune to work over the past several years, and welcome the new faces to the board. I have learned so much about leadership from outgoing Past President Randy Philipp and Executive Director Tim Hendrix in my time on the Board, and I am thankful for their mentoring, guidance, and friendship. I will deeply miss the contributions of Secretary Sandi Cooper and Member-at-Large Eva Thanheiser to our collective efforts, and am so very glad that they’ve both agreed to continue to be involved in new capacities going forward! I’m thrilled to be able to work alongside our new Executive Director Shari Stockero, an amazing leader who I quite fittingly met for the first time at AMTE in 2007, when both of us were completing our first years in faculty positions. I’m excited to work again with our President-Elect Megan Burton, who was an invaluable member of the Standards Dissemination Task Force, and to hear the voices of Secretary Cynthia Taylor and Member-at-Large Marrielle Myers as we think about the future of AMTE.

How quickly my first year serving as your President has gone! I am so excited for us to chart a course together forward and ensure a bright future for AMTE. I look forward to hearing from you about your hopes and dreams for AMTE, and celebrating our conference’s 25th birthday next February in Orlando.

Yours in service,

Mike