Meet this month’s featured NIC member, Greg Koscik, nominated by his Faculty Mentor for his exceptional commitment to improving Quantway curriculum and pedagogy.

A Quantway instructor of two years at Nicolet Area Technical College in Wisconsin, Koscik, is playing an important role in one of the Pathways network’s biggest milestones: the development of new, fully-online courses.

With the Pathways online design team, Koscik is helping develop an online Quantway Core course scheduled to roll out in the spring of 2020. He has been heavily involved in the content transformation process, testing, and design of the new virtual course.

As part of the Pathwyas Curriculum Committee, Koscik also reviews assessment items and works on Item Bank improvement. Over the past year, he has systematically organized all items in the Quantway College Item Bank and ensured that all lessons had a sufficient number of items. This revamped Item Bank will be released for use in the fall. He regularly teaches Quantway Core and College both in-person and online.

He said one big draw to teaching and developing Quantway courses is that the curriculum places math in meaningful context for students, which leads to higher retention and success rates.

“The way it is now in most one-size-fits-all (algebra) classes, there’s little to no authentic context. In most traditional classes there’s only solving for X for the sake of solving for X,” Koscik said, adding that Quantway content is something that students genuinely want to learn.

His Faculty Mentor, Aaron Altose of Cuyahoga Community College in Ohio, reaffirmed Koscik’s commitment to creating engaging contextualized lessons.

“Greg is a frequent contributor to the Pathways network, sharing ideas for new Quantitative Reasoning contexts and ways to strengthen the pedagogy and assessments of Quantway College,” Altose said.

“He truly aspires for Quantway College to be the best possible course for his students and also for the health and growth of the Carnegie Math Pathways as a whole.”

Altose added that Koscik continuously seeks ways to both improve the course and increase its rigor.

Koscik also plays a central role in training newly hired adjuncts to teach Quantway at Nicolet as a Faculty Facilitator on his campus.

Beyond his involvement with Carnegie Math Pathways, Koscik is an active member of WisMATYC–the Wisconsin Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges.

Koscik graduated from Oakland University in Michigan with a master’s degree in Mathematics in 2010. He began teaching at Nicolet in 2013 after teaching at College of the Albemarle in North Carolina from 2010 to 2013.

A newly released WestEd study examines the challenges and successes of the Pathways’ corequisite implementation at six institutions in six different states. Across these institutions, 65% of students—students who would have otherwise been placed into traditional developmental courses—earned college math credit in a single semester. That’s more than three times the success rate of the traditional remedial approach, saving students time and money on their path to a degree.

On March 13th, we hosted a webinar to share these promising findings alongside the Pathways faculty who piloted the corequisite offerings:

• • Ellen Mulqueeny, Math Faculty, Kent State University
  • Yolanda Manzano, Math Faculty, Richland College
  • Thales Georgiou, Instructional Dean, Richland College
  • Kelly Kohlmetz, Math Faculty, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

You can view answers here to questions posed during the webinar that our panelists could not answer in the allotted time.

When Brenda Oursler White first started college, she wanted to be an art teacher. Although she had a passion for art at the begnning of her academic career, she missed math and ultimately earned an associate’s degree in liberal arts, mathematics at SUNY Morrisville.

After transferring to Syracuse University, she worked as a student employee in the Learning Center and Office of Disability Services, where she saw first-hand just how prevalent math anxiety was on her campus.

“That is when I decided to not just become a math teacher but to stay in the arena of higher education,” she said.

At Syracuse, she went on to earn her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in math education, as well as a master’s in higher education student affairs. In 2000, she returned to her alma mater, SUNY Morrisville, where she is now an associate professor in the department of mathematical sciences.

In 2015 White set out to learn more about Quantway and Statway at the request of Morrisville president, Dave Rodgers, who had heard about these programs from the SUNY system’s then-chancellor, Nancy Zimpher.

“So many students start at the remedial (or) developmental level and are taking basic arithmetic—elementary algebra—two, three, four, five times without success and then often leave,” White said.

“(We were) really trying to create an alternative Pathway to help students be more successful so we brought this to our campus very slowly.”

By the fall of 2016, White was team-teaching Quantway at her campus. The team-teaching model, she said, allowed her and her colleagues to learn from each other and to continue the process of training other colleagues on how to teach Quantway.

Since 2016, White has also become increasingly involved with Carnegie Math Pathways behind the scenes, most recently as our newest Faculty Mentor, a role in which she helps faculty teaching the Pathways for the first time. She is also a lead writer for Quantway Fundamentals lessons and writes and reviews lessons as part of the CMP Curriculum Committee. She serves as a SUNY Pathways Faculty Liaison, where she works with other SUNY faculty to ensure their professional needs are met. And, she has participated in the Mindset Scholars Network, where she provided and gained meaningful feedback on her Quantway instruction.

While she has found her involvement with the Pathways professional learning teams rewarding, she most cherishes the changes she sees in her students when they experience the Quantway course. White reflected on a student who was intensely math-phobic, but who quickly embraced the group learning dynamics of Quantway.

“I don’t know if she would still be here, honestly, if it wasn’t for Quantway…It’s changed her life,” she said, noting that the student most recently expressed this in a letter to White, along with gratitude for her instruction and for Quantway.

White looks forward to continuing her Pathways work in the New Year, and to helping other educators in the network improve their practice.

Welcome, Mark Brodksy!

Mark Brodsky joined the Carnegie Math Pathways team this October as Partnership Director. In this role, he will support colleges currently implementing the Pathways and will help bring Statway and Quantway to more colleges across the country.

“I am looking forward to helping Carnegie Math Pathways add new member institutions-keeping and growing the ones we already have-and hopefully contributing to the Pathwyas’ growth and evolution as an organization,” he said.

Mark has over 25 years in the education technology sector, including start-ups and early stage and large organizations. Before joining the team he was the executive vice president of sales and customer success at Sci Inc. He holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from San Diego State University.

This month, the Carnegie Math Pathways team is celebrating its first anniversary at WestEd. After successfully transitioning our program last year from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, we are thrilled to report that WestEd’s experienced operations and research staff have helped us better serve our more than 90 institutions across the country.

“We’re fortunate to be collaborating with colleagues across the organization to help us achieve our mission of better serving students,” Karon Klipple, executive director, said.

WestEd’s strong commitment to equity and outcomes across educational systems has translated into fruitful collaborations for the CMP team. We are working closely with WestEd’s Innovation Studies program to strengthen outcomes in dual enrollment in California, so that our learnings can be applied more broadly across the country. We’re also working closely with WestEd’s Reading Apprenticeship program in order to provide more complete support to institutions, faculty, and students,for both reading and mathematics.

Based in WestEd’s STEM office in Redwood City, California, the Pathways have gained thought partners across the organization and look forward to many years of productive collaboration ahead.