Working with Schools: The Story of a Mathematics Education Collaboration

marked the last official meeting of the Diversity in Mathematics Education (DiME) seminar, a five-year middle grades professional development collaboration between the NSF-funded DiME project at Berkeley and the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD). There had been, as BUSD's Superintendent said that day, some bumps in the road during our collaboration. But there was also real progress. There is a sense of community and a set of developing competencies that were not present among the middle school teachers when the project was started. Equally important, the District has now taken on the full costs of the professional development effort, including partial release time for a district-wide mathematics coach and for mathematics coaches at each of Berkeley's middle schools. In addition, it is expanding the effort into the elementary schools. As people involved with schools will tell you, the odds of something like this happening are somewhere between epsilon and epsilon squared, where epsilon is very small. This article describes the essence of our collaboration, including some of the bumps in the road, with the goal of abstracting some of the lessons learned for mathematicians and others who want to lend their knowledge and talents to help in the schools. I begin in historical mode, describing the origins of the DiME project and our relationship with BUSD. I then characterize the context within which we work and my philosophical approach to professional development. This sets the stage for a portrayal of the first year of the DiME seminar, which conveys the give-and-take of a developing university–schools partnership. Having described one year in some detail, I pull back to abstract over the next few years of the seminar, focusing on two main themes: first, a description of the complexities of working with a " loosely coupled " school system, in which decision-making is strongly decentralized, and second, a description of some of the mathematical and pedagogical needs of middle school teachers and some of the progress it was possible to make in the seminar. I conclude with some suggestions derived from my experiences.