SFU EGSA Fall 2011 Seminar Series

What an amazing experience.  First of all, I had no idea was the EGSA Seminar Series was all about.  It is a new phenomena at SFU.  EGSA means “Education Graduate Students Association.”  If you have not figured it out yet (because it took me many months to adhere to this concept), I am a full-time graduate student at SFU.  Not to describe myself with titles, but I’ve been a “secondary mathematics teacher” for such a long time.  To consider myself as something else is new territory.  I am an education grad student.  So there.

Now that I have embraced the idea of full-time graduate studies (along with small edu-jobs on the side), I have committed myself to embark on opportunities a grad student would consider.  For example, I am going to be one of the Site Assistants at SFU (Surrey) helping out the Masters of Education Educational Leadership K-12 Cohort.  Am I stoked?  Yes I am.  Amongst many other things, aside from working on my dissertation, I submitted an abstract to the EGSA Seminar Series.  I had never written an abstract and it was a great vehicle to sort out my thoughts regarding my dissertation.  I mean, why not?

Not expecting much, I just moved on with my studies, life with family, and paddling in the canoe.  Then, I got the news… I not only got the Site Assistant position, my abstract was blind peer-reviewed and accepted, and I got formative feedback from my committee members.  Wow.  A hat-trick of happiness.  Now what?  With feedback, comes revisions… my paper all of a sudden took a shift from the abstract I had submitted.  My mind was in a mix and found preparing for the EGSA Seminar challenging to say the least.  Biggest question:  What am I presenting?  Present what I had, what I will have, or a mix of both?

Response:  The dissertation is a learning process, so why not embed my learning of the dissertation process with some of the content of my thesis disclosing that “things” have changed.  And, so I did.  I treated or attempted to exemplify to my fellow education grad students my struggles of narrowing my question, what’s my literature review is going to look like, the methodology, and the SO WHAT.  That was the toughest part for me to figure out… what’s the point of my dissertation?  What do I want to get out of it?  Very good questions posed by the audience, committee, and myself.  Bottom line: What’s the point?

Then, it came to me… it’s not about the standardized assessments that worry me, per se, but if the claims of student achievement relies on the content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge of teachers, then what needs to be seriously considered is how do non-mathematics subject specialists teachers learn ‘on-the-job’ to build their expertise as practicing secondary math teachers.  Knowing this, then school districts can offer programs to support the professional learning of these teachers, thus improve the quality of instruction with hopes of positively affecting student achievement in secondary mathematics.

Thanks for letting me sort that out Bloggies and EGSA.  I would highly encourage others, if you’re like me, to engage in activities such as the SFU EGSA Seminar Series to sort out ideas, present them, and get immediate feedback.  Thank you family, friends, colleagues, and classmates for giving me this learning opportunity.  In return, I have included the link to the live feed of the EGSA event.  I’m about 43 minutes into the video footage…
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17132778