Math Ed Forum Meeting Minutes
Saturday, September 27, 1997
held at The Fields Institute, Toronto.
1. Welcoming Remarks:
Don Dawson, Director, The Fields Institute
2. Membership and Steering Committee Nominations:
Bill Langford, Deputy Director, The Fields Institute
3. The Fields-Nortel White Paper:
The following are the group's recommendations with reference to the
Ministry of Education & Training's RFP for Curriculum Guidelines.
A. Recommendations to the Proposal Writing Team:
- Why? we care about mathematics in Ontario, be involved in the direction
of math education
- credentials of the proposal team/sponsoring agencies
- political link for purposes of lobbying MET on our behalf
- advisory body to proposal team
- process from MET will be very open
- MET will release names of groups who have submitted proposals
- there will be a question/answer process
- should be aware of what bodies would submit proposals
- should we include an Ontario Francophone?
- we should be expert at writing proposals (colleges, universities)
(NAFTA Rules)
- no budget for proposal team
- stakeholders should be involved
- total solution/total package as part of the proposal, anticipate everything/big
picture
- email has limited success for communicating and secrecy could be a
problem
- Fields offers their facilities and email capabilities
- will RFP be in both French & English?
- would MET welcome input to RFP process prior to release?
- proposal writing experts: Peter Muller, Humber College;- want suggestions
from Fields- part of budget process
- will these guarantors influence the rep. on the writing team?
- strength of proposal comes from education program described
- Ministry would look at proposals where they could save MET with future
implementation costs
B. Recommendations to the Guideline Writing Team:
- credentials of guideline team
- political link for purposes of lobbying MET on our behalf
- should guideline team be geographical/linguistically representative?
- team should write for the different factions in math teachers
- stakeholders should be involved
- high school students on guideline writing team/students at college
and university as part of advisory team
- parents on advisory team
- process is very important in writing the guideline
- Fields offers their facilities and email capabilities
- consultation can be very difficult/very expensive, needs a lot of
thought
- publisher on the Guideline Writing Team but this gives one publisher
an unfair advantage so Can. Book Publishers Council would be better
to be involved
- project manager is key: seconded from Boards are able to be seconded,
proved to have this experience - resource material from Fields work
and members
ACTION: Bill, Mike and Judy to write a memo out to potential guarantors
ASAP - Boards York, Waterloo, Peel; Universities, York, Toronto, McMaster,
Queens, Waterloo - as financial guarantors.
Proposal from The Fields Institute (Math. Ed. Forum) which includes
OAMC/OCMA/OMCA to be decided by the Proposal Writing Team (Guideline
Writing Team needs a representative from apprenticeship sector).
4. Proposal for Mathematics Course Guidelines - an overview
Mike and Judy gave a brief overview of The Ontario Curriculum Grades
1-8 Mathematics. Intro. is excellent and the emphasis on technology
is well done. The spirit of the guideline is good, but it is not ready
with the details teachers need. It misses the flow from one grade to
another.
The meeting ended with the motion that the next meeting of the Mathematics
Education Forum be held on Saturday, November 22, 1997, 10:30 - 2:00
pm at The Fields Institute, Toronto.
