Spreadsheets are everywhere. We see them in almost every business and bureaucratic context – real estate, insurance, design and engineering, biotech, office management in state and local agencies, on and on, as well as at home, of course --for people’s records keeping and communications. Quite a while ago, Excel and similar products, became the ubiquitous tool undergirding the contemporary workplace.
Surprisingly, the place where they may be least visible and least utilitarian remains our schools. It’s a bit of a head scratcher. But their absence is another stark reminder that we have not done enough to be truly permeable to the “real world” in shaping the experience of high school and the preparation we offer our young people. Outdated approaches to curriculum keep in place an antiquated math experience we should have addressed decades ago, when the digital age began.
In New Hampshire, however, there’s good news. Three high schools are digging into a new conversation about refreshing, I’d say modernizing, how they want their students to use and appreciate mathematics.... and more! When What If Math reached out to ERC in search of potential venues to go deeper, a few places came quickly to mind. Three Granite State schools -Pembroke Academy, White Mountains Regional High School, and, of late, Souhegan High School- have joined ERC’s intensifying innovation efforts, looking at inquiry learning, new curriculum concepts, technologies, and even a new secondary prototype Reimagining-school.
That proposed collaboration is quickly becoming a reality -The NH Spreadsheet initiative-- with the stated goal of making every NH student “spreadsheet capable” and fully prepared for digital age jobs and citizenry, with a focus on collaborative problem solving and transdisciplinary learning. Wow! Suitably ambitious and necessary!
With support and participation from teachers and leaders at each school, the stage has been set for a Winter 2021 on-going seminar involving faculty from each of the schools. What If Math is facilitating the seminar at no charge for each school, along with individual and small team coaching for participants who want to probe different possibilities. ERC has been facilitating the work thus far, beginning with a video symposium, “Introduction to Spreadsheets & What If Concepts” in early October, along with next-steps discussions with school leaders. It’s exciting, we think, not only for New Hampshire and for the field, but especially for those many students who pass through high school doing their best to stay away from math, or who see it as something to be endured. And, for those who excel in the current paradigm and who love math, we can open new doors and possibilities.
As I alluded to in a prior newsletter, (what-if) the What If Math founders, Art Bardige and Peter Mili, are big picture thinkers, and energetic scholars with vast amounts of experience in schools professional development, math, science, and educational technology. They’ve looked far and wide about the kinds of math and mathematic thinking required across the employment spectrum. They’re not offering a packaged, off-the-shelf math curriculum, something we’ve seen way too much of with little to show. They prefer to engage and support educators to self-examine classroom practices, as well as concepts that at one time might have seemed important but which no longer hold up beyond “school”.
What’s been surprising to Bardige and Mili is the degree to which the school folks have quickly viewed the conversation as extending beyond “just math”. Although it’s called, “What If Math” the approach and vision are transdisciplinary and holistic. They see entering the overdue conversation on re-thinking our approaches to math only as an essential first step. Where they’re headed long-term is spreadsheets in and across all domains, and as a glue in a variety of new learning configurations.
In that first video Symposium, Souhegan faculty member Jennifer Bonsu-Anane shared a memorable point of view. “My 31-year old son told me that his ability to use spreadsheets opened up doors to good-paying careers. Since graduating from college, he has worked in corporate type jobs, first at Dick's Sporting Goods, then Lowe's, and now Honeywell. His college degree was in Economics, but surprisingly, he didn't use spreadsheets a lot. He realized he’d need to learn to use them during an internship he had in a hospital finance department, and again at his on-campus job at University of South Carolina. He also started refereeing intramural sports, and kept at it throughout college. By the time he was a senior, he was scheduling intramural games and all the courts and referees - using spreadsheets, of course!”
Hearing that stellar, real-world endorsement made us curious to ask others in the schools about their perspectives. Shane MacElhiney. Math teacher and Building Leadership Team member at White Mountains is another who hasn’t needed much convincing about the role of spreadsheets, "The fact is, the world does math in spreadsheets. As part of our focus on helping students to learn key skills they’ll need to be successful in THEIR futures, spreadsheets are becoming a central platform at WMRHS. It's an essential part of the Inquiry Tool Kit, helping students with collecting, organizing, displaying, calculating with, and analyzing data."
“At WMRHS we’ve recognized that ‘silo-ing’ math and science limits a student’s opportunities to learn math in context and to apply math in authentic situations, two things that could engage them and make them more confident learners. We also embrace the vision of Ted Sizer and the Coalition of Essential Schools curriculum integration, and we’re advancing a multi-year integrated math/science curriculum."
Jacob Hess, Shane’s principal at White Mountains adds, “Combining separate math and science courses into our current Math/Science sequence actually came about as a way for students who struggled with math abstractions to make connections, and for them to see ideas and processes in practice in a different content area (science). It also fits right into our philosophy of having teaching colleagues, whether in our content area or not, be looking at each other’s lessons, units, and ideas in order to improve the quality of our work.”
Chris Motika, Director of Curriculum and Instruction for the district that includes Pembroke Academy has been looking for new ideas and conversations to share from his domain. “I think it's important to keep in mind that spreadsheets, and What If Math, are not just about math and numbers, they are about making data meaningful in authentic contexts, about finding new and unique ways of seeing, manipulating, and working with datasets. Thinking about What if spreadsheets in this way can and should make us wonder... could we utilize other data sets to help students delve into other kinds of problems? We’re seeing nothing but possibilities in this endeavor and have started to bring the foundations of What if Math to our Science department. Science shares a natural connection to math, and is full of phenomena-based learning; taking data and observation to make sense of something. We are so excited to have two departments working to help students explore mathematical concepts through spreadsheets and data.”
“There’s some interesting commentary on why it’s important to have deep collaborations with outside thinkers. When we were discussing how a teacher had found a classroom program that would likely be easier to manipulate, Art Bardige interjected some real-world common sense. "Our goal wasn't to create a product like that. Those products aren’t part of what people do in the workplace, outside of school. One of our goals has been to promote conversation and deeper thinking, grappling with ideas as students manipulate the numbers." His comment pulled me back to our purpose as educators - to create the conditions so that learning can happen. There may be other programs or tools that may seem easier to manipulate, more appealing, but they simply show what happens in a graph. What if Math investigations come with prompts that encourage deep inquiry so that students can address their own ‘why’s’, can mimic the big questions that drive people and organizations, and be prepared for real life, not an abridged, ‘in-school’ reality.”
Art Bardige has more to say: “Our students ask, “Why do I have to learn this?” and too often today, we do not have an answer. Because indeed, so much of the math we ask them to learn is obsolete and has been for years. They will never use it and they won’t need it. We have to ask, “What math will students need to learn to thrive in the digital age?” We believe we should be preparing them to calculate on spreadsheets not on paper, to solve problems, build models, and manipulate data using functions and functional thinking, not just manipulate symbols, to work collaboratively in teams and communicate with graphs and other visual representations and not be lost in abstractions.”
In imagining the Network at its best, Peter Mili adds, “Creating and modifying lessons during the school year is always challenging, especially when integrating something innovative and novel for the students. My experiences in making changes to my practice were always more successful when I was collaborating with colleagues, where support, questioning, feedback, and coaching helped me persist when needed. This persistence helped make innovations become an integrated part of my practice, benefitting my students. My hope is that providing this ongoing support will increase the probability of a successful implementation of new pedagogies.
Pembroke Academy Dean of Instruction Amy Parkinson shared, “We have a brand new Innovation Academy here and we spend a lot of time talking about application and transferable skills. A benefit of an approach like What If Math is that it creates an instructional structure that both allows our students to question and explore AND gives them a strong foundation in the use of spreadsheets. The use of spreadsheets is increasingly transferable across “adult life” and when paired with inquiry practices like those we’re pursuing with ERC, students quickly see that there is a real world application to the work they’re doing in high school. No more ‘when will I use this in the real world?’ questions.”
Souhegan Principal Mike Berry also offers a timely perspective. Me as a leader, and we --all of us-- as a faculty, especially now with COVID but not only due to that, have to be willing to blend the old and the familiar with the need to prepare young people for a new world, one we can’t fully imagine. Spreadsheets are something that hit that mark. We remember the old math, but it's not in much use any more outside of schools. This is the new way. And ERC and What If Math are two “out front”, big-thinking organizations. The willingness to be open to the world is something we’re proud of at this school, and we have the talent to do it well.”
Bardige makes a really important point about another reason spreadsheets can be so valuable in school math. “We are especially excited about including students who may have struggled with math to jump into using spreadsheets. Pursuing math on spreadsheets is concrete, it’s real, and can be applied to interesting problems outside of the classroom and school. It’s also highly collaborative so that students help each other to practice good problem solving methodology. And it's exciting to get the immediate feedback, the sense that you’ve made something work. Spreadsheet math gives every student a fresh start.”
“We love our partnership with ERC”, says Mili. “And we’re really excited about engaging with forward thinking schools in New Hampshire as the beginning of another great relationship, one that can truly integrate math into inquiry learning, into STEM and STEAM, into other natural reaches within the learning universe. Especially now, it will help prepare teachers and schools to function as effectively online as they do face-to-face.”
Bardige concludes, “We’re currently extending the collaboration between ERC and What If to develop a next generation of online cross-disciplinary content that focuses on problem solving and inquiry. We call these new creative/collaborative learning opportunities, Explorations. They combine the vibrancy, richness, and interactivity of ERC Grand Challenges Web-links with the problem solving capability of What If Math spreadsheets and other shared learning tools to promote real-world, complex and absorbing problem solving. We look forward to bringing these exciting new learning opportunities and their integrated STEAM vision to the New Hampshire Spreadsheet Initiative to help schools prepare students for their future and not our past.”