[Program Committee Series] What I Learned From Being On A NCTM Program Committee

I recently participated on my first National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) program committee which is tasked with selecting the speakers for the 2015 regional conference in Nashville, Tennessee.  I had very little understanding as to how these conferences came together and I was excited to be a part of it as I had so much to learn.  I had a wonderfully enriching experience and wanted to share what I found out so that more people can gain insight and ultimately continue to refine and improve the process.  Here are some thoughts in no particular order:

• The NCTM leadership is filled with really competent people whose words and actions demonstrate that their top priorities are ensuring that the conferences are relevant and worthwhile for all.  NCTM President Diane Briars made it clear that we needed to increase the amount of quality sessions for K-2 and Algebra II / Integrated III or higher.  She wanted to be sure that every math educator felt like they belonged at an NCTM conference.  It was more important to her to help make NCTM a stronger community than it was to simply do what she said.
• Diane basically stated that she is willing to rethink all aspects of the conference (for example, having one big opening speaker versus two smaller keynotes or even an Ignite format).  Everything was on the table and we could choose whatever we thought might work best.  In our committee we thought that some of the biggest benefits teachers experience come from the conversations with other educators outside of the sessions so we were trying to incorporate one or more sessions that allow educators to make connections with others with similar interests.  This flexibility will certainly lead to some mistakes but also opportunities to innovate and improve.  It was great to experience first hand.
• The full time NCTM employees were very knowledgeable in regards to the conference planning process and did a great job guiding us through it.
• A common conversation point was the need to increase the number of “millennials” in the process as they (we?) are the future of American math education.
• They shared data about “Who Does NCTM Serve?” which I show in the picture below (which is a photo of a screen display).  The interesting data provides more questions than answers.  For example:
  • Who are the “Not Applicable / Undeclared people”?  Teacher specialists and coaches?  Administrators?
  • Who are K-12 teachers?  Are those the coaches or does someone actually teach K-12?
  • Also I just realized that the percentages are not all calculated the same way…

 

• About 20% to 30% of a conference’s attendees tend to come from the area where the conference is hosted.
• The people on the three committees (Nashville, Minneapolis, and Atlantic City) were passionate and accomplished math educators who worked very well together.  One of my core beliefs is “the group is smarter than the smartest person in the group.”  Together we put created a much better potential speaker lineup than any one of us could have done on our own.
• The western United States seemed to be very underrepresented amongst the committee members.  I may be mistaken but by my count there were 27 members amongst the 3 committees and the only people from the Western United States were me and Christina Tondevold from Idaho.  More on the implications of this later.
• For some time I’ve wondered exactly how the speakers were chosen for an NCTM conference.  Was it a matter of knowing the right people or did it all come down to who wrote the best proposals?  As it turns out, it’s a combination of both, for better and worse.  Here is how the process of putting together a set of speakers worked from my perspective.
  • The first task is determining what the conference’s major strands will be.  For example the strand I worked on was “Teaching with High Quality Tasks.”  Establishing these strands help guide the entire speaker selection process as the program committee tries to select speakers who can speak to those big ideas.
  • There are basically three tiers of speakers that are populated by the committee.  The first tier is the keynote or opening session speaker(s).  That person has as much national prominence as possible and ideally is an engaging speaker that will be a big draw.  The program committee members are tasked with brainstorming this list of names.  The program chairs then rank them based on many factors including how recently the speaker spoke near the conference’s location and whether they have been well received during past presentations.  As an example of who might make this list, each of the three committees included Jo Boaler and Dan Meyer.
  • The second tier included invited and encouraged speakers.  Again, this list was populated by the program committee members and was based on who would be a good fit for each of the strands.  Invited speakers are basically guaranteed to present but have to speak about a topic related to the strand.  Encouraged speakers have more flexibility in terms of what they could present on and while they were not guaranteed to present, the fact that they were on the encouraged list will significantly help their chances.
    • This is where it got very interesting for me though.  I was genuinely surprised to learn that people I highly respect and admire (and who have many fans in the MTBoS) such as Fawn Nguyen and Andrew Stadel were unknown by almost the entire committee.  I understand that prior to social networking and education blogs, there was significantly less collaboration and sharing of ideas but it made me realize that spending so much time in the MTBoS warps your perspective as to who is well known.  For what it’s worth, Eric Milou presents dozens of times a year across the country and he says that when he asks who has heard of Dan Meyer, few hands raise up.  If that is our litmus test, then maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising.
    • As a result, since these committees are so heavily populated by people from the Midwest and East Coast, clearly the committee members will more likely be associated with others from that area and therefore the speakers they nominate will more likely come from those areas.  Accordingly, I found that to be an area of growth for future program committees because if we strive to be more inclusive nationally, we need to more intentionally pick a geographically diverse set of committee members.
  • Once the committee has brainstormed their list of names for the second tier we had to check for duplicates and narrow the lists down to ten speakers per strand.  The rest of the nominated speakers either became invite alternates or encouraged speakers.
  • The list for encouraged speakers was further grown at this point with each committee member getting a specific grade band to focus on.  I believe that the options were K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12, Higher Ed, General Interest, and Research.  I had Grades 6-8 and tried to list as many names as possible.  It was a peculiar moment for me as I felt something I can best liken to when someone wins an award and gives a speech.  There are plenty of people they want to list but somehow their brain goes blank and they can’t remember everyone.  I know I must have left off many people but I tried my best.  I had brought a list of 25 names to the meeting but if I ever have the opportunity to do this again, I am going to come with many more.
  • The final tier of people are the speakers who will apply on their own.  I learned that roughly 50% of their proposals will not be accepted.  I also learned how their proposals will be evaluated.  NCTM uses a rubric that measures how well the proposals answer the questions listed on page 4 and 5 of this document under “Proposal Rating”.  The better the score, the better the chances it will be accepted.  They gave us a few sample proposals to score but I need significantly more experience before I will feel calibrated and able to discern what separates a good proposal from a bad one.
• The last things I wanted to share were some wishlist ideas for improving this process going forward:
  • Let’s poll the world (and especially the MTBoS) about their interests to provide a list of topics and speakers they want to see.  The downside may be that someone could game the system and submit their name many times.  The upside could be that a person or topic that is not on a committee’s radar will be taken into consideration.  To me, if a person cares enough about mathematics education that they want to complete the survey, then that person is someone who might actually fly to attend the conference and will be more invested in making it good.
  • Many social media sites including YouTube and Reddit allow users to vote their content up or down based on whether they like it.   So, why not let the world (and especially the MTBoS) rate proposals?  All the proposals are already in a database so what if we were to set up a webpage where visitors could see a random set of ten titles and descriptions to give feedback on.  The downside could again be people trying to game the system but the upside would be that perhaps there are hot topics the committee isn’t aware of but should be.  The decision would not be solely based on the website feedback but couldn’t that be another component to consider?
  • My last idea is a small gimmick that just might work.  What if there was some sort of NCTM rewards program?  For example, what if you got a stackable $5 discount towards the next conference every time you attend a conference.  Each time you went to a conference, your discount would increase until it capped out at some point.  This would encourage people to go to conferences and keep going.  You could also tie it to the two surveys above and give additional discounts for those as well.  I think this would greatly increase participation and grow the entire organization’s base.  The downside could be decreased revenue from frequent attendees but perhaps that could be offset by increased revenue from new members.

 

On August 21, 2014 I received additional information from Michael Barbagallo who is the NCTM Senior Manager for Member Services.  He helpfully provided me with additional information as to the table photograph above.  I have included a portion of his email, with his permission, as it helps to clarify the data and answer the questions I posed.

I built the table from information that attendees voluntarily supplied during the registration process.  Not Applicable/Undeclared are registrants who did not offer any demographic information and where it could not easily be determined what their function was.  While we require the registrants to supply their job function (Experienced teacher, coach, administrator, etc.) and grade level taught when registering on the web, many of our registrations still come in on paper forms.  It is there that that information is not supplied.

K-12 teachers are people who have said they are teachers or other professionals who work directly with K-12 students (coaches, specialists, principles, etc.) or registrants where it was easy to determine what they did (e.g. noted a middle or high school as where they worked).  The numbers below K-12 Teachers are the percentages of K-12 teachers focusing on various grade strands.  For example, in Baltimore there were 1,829 people who defined themselves as working with K-12 students.  That equated to 70% of the total attendees population.  Of that 1,829, 195 declared they work with PK-2 graders or 11% of the 1,829.