Resilience: Adapting to Change and Looking Ahead
My first thought as I sat down to write this quarter’s column: what a long, strange trip it’s been. Most of you have been in quarantine for just about the length of an epic Grateful Dead jam at this point in time. Along the way, you’ve changed your ways of working and interacting with your students, found ways to adapt and continue your research agendas, engaged with colleagues in tiny rectangular boxes on screens, and balanced these new ways of working with your own mental and physical health.
So my first message to you is this: thank you. You’ve done great. And you’ve done heroic work for our mathematics teacher education community.
AMTE members came together at the dawn of the pandemic to mobilize resources to help one another. I want to thank each and every person who contributed resources to our collection, engaged our membership in webinars, created podcasts, or had more informal interactions that supported us all during these past few months. You can peruse the curated list of resources here; if there are additional resources you’d like to see listed on this page, please reach out and let us know.
How AMTE is Adapting to Change
As an organization, we’ve had to adapt to change as well during the pandemic. I’d like to provide you with a little bit of information about how we’re doing that. First and foremost, we are proceeding with the 2021 Annual Conference with the intention of convening together in person in Orlando next February. (And thanks to everyone who submitted a proposal!) We are cognizant that it will be a while before we know fully what the impact on our conference will be: whether people will be able to travel, what the status of university and district travel funds might be, and whether we will be able to hold a large convening at all. Our Conference and Program Committees, along with the Board, are thinking through a number of possibilities in order to be prepared for what may be possible and what may not be.
Given that our conference is the main source of income that sustains our organization, we have begun looking at how to guide our organization in a fiscally conservative way in the months leading up to the conference. I have two announcements in this vein. First, the Board of Directors typically meets for a 2½-day Fall retreat in October to do major planning and leadership development. We will be taking this meeting into an online virtual space this year rather than convening in person. This is both in deference to our Board of Directors’ safety and comfort with respect to traveling and a means to trim expenditures.
Second, with many universities restricting travel through the summer, we have been forced to reconceptualize the 2020 STaR program. Rather than gather our new crop of STaR fellows in Park City, Utah the third week in June as we have done for 10 years, we will conduct an abbreviated online program for our 2020 STaR cohort this summer. Next summer, we will have a brief in-person 2020 STaR convening in Park City immediately prior to our 2021 STaR cohort meeting. This step is responsive to the current travel restrictions while still meeting our commitment to support and serve the 2020 cohort of early career mathematics teacher educators. This move also will help the overall fiscal health of the organization in a difficult time.
Finally, we recognize that fall is not likely to be a typical semester for universities and K-12 districts. We know that this situation will have a significant impact on the work that we do in preparing future teachers of mathematics and support mathematics teacher professional development. AMTE is at the early stages of collecting information about how universities and districts are working together to deal with possible constraints to field placements, additional iterations of remote instruction at the K-12 and university levels, and anticipated changes due to social distancing requirements in universities and schools. The Emerging Issues Committee is interested in hearing your perspectives and experiences and intends to compile guidance very soon for universities and districts who are stakeholders in preparing teachers of mathematics. Please fill out this survey to help us understand how to better support you in your preparations for the incoming fall semester: https://bit.ly/amte20field.
Looking Ahead
As we continue to adapt to change in the moment, AMTE’s Board of Directors looks to the future of our organization. Over the past several months, we have heard from hundreds of members in our request for feedback to shape the long-term goals of the organization. The Board has synthesized your feedback and will be approving a set of long-term goals for the organization in June. Following this approval, we will share these goals with our membership and begin crafting objectives to make progress on these goals for the next 18 months.
While long-term planning is never an activity that engenders great enthusiasm, it has truly been an honor for myself and the Board to engage in AMTE’s first true planning process of this type. It is a sign of stability and maturity for our organization that we are now able to move beyond year-to-year planning and move with an eye toward the horizon. I’m thankful for the thoughtful work that previous Boards have done, particularly the multi-year restructuring project, that has put us in a strong position to engage in this work.
I’m excited for our future as an organization. I’m humbled by the nimbleness that our members have demonstrated during the unprecedented disruptive event. And I’m heartened by the amazing outpourings of support that I see in our community day after day for one another, for the teachers with which we work, and for their students.
Take heart, stay healthy, and be well. The road ahead will be an exciting one.