Nashville students costar with their teacher in a Mathline video module about teaching probability concepts.

Public TV to expand Mathline while moving into science

Originally published in Current, Feb. 26, 1996
By Steve Behrens

By fall, PBS hopes to clone the methods and the successes of its two-year-old Mathline teacher-training project to launch a parallel venture called ScienceLine.

As Mathline expands from middle school to the elementary grades, participating public TV stations and PBS also will begin reaching out to science teachers in the K-6 grades.

ScienceLine, like the math project, rides a wave of teachers' interest in new national standards for content and teaching methods, inspired by the governors' Goals 2000 hubbub of several years ago. Science standards were released in December by the National Research Council--part of the National Academy of Sciences--and endorsed by the National Science Teachers Association. NSTA will cooperate with PBS to develop ScienceLine.

The math project has made waves of its own within the world of public TV, bypassing the broadcasting antenna almost entirely and demonstrating the potential for narrowcast services using other technologies.

"We were really questioned by a lot of people when we didn't have a broadcast component," recalls PBS Executive Vice President Sandy Welch. "They thought we had gone off the deep end."

The easy assumption then was that Mathline would be a narrow-interest program service modelled after the cable networks--a continuous string of programs for classroom instruction. Instead, it turned out to employ a mix of videocassette, online and teleconferencing technologies aimed at teachers, not students.

Stations have joined in, completing the vital link with local teachers. Mathline quadrupled in size between 1994 and 1995, going from 500 teachers and 20 stations to 2,000 teachers and 68 stations. (Since there are more than 100,000 middle-school math teachers in the country, there's room left for growth.)

Mathline and ScienceLine are parts of a newly reorganized arm of PBS called Teacher Resources and Services or, in the press-release phrase, "Ready to Teach." The focus, says Vice President Jinny Goldstein, is where the greatest needs in education are: the teachers.

Mathline has been well received, says Mary Harley Kruter, the longtime teacher who runs the project at PBS, because its planners went to math educators and asked what needed doing. "We're the most consumer-driven thing that PBS has ever done."

The result was a combination of technologies that seems to fit well into the harried and isolated worklives of classroom teachers.

Together, video and online offer the advantages always touted for "distance education"--specialized learning opportunities that don't require the learner to come to class at a particular time and place. "They don't have to wait till summer to take a course, or sign up every Wednesday night," says Kruter. And the experience continues with online discussions and support for a year, instead of ending abruptly.

Though they are surrounded by kids and colleagues, teachers lead a solitary professional life. Caught in their busy routines, they seldom get time to talk with others who teach the same classes, says Jenny Walters, educational services coordinator at WSRE in Pensacola, Fla. But with Mathline, "the walls of the classroom have kind of tumbled," she says. The online service, offered through local stations, gives them convenient access to colleagues "who are just as excited about trying new things as they are."

Reasoning, not rote

Saul Rockman, a researcher who has long experience at the Agency for Instructional Television, Apple Computer and the Far West Regional Educational Laboratory, says he has found that many teachers from Mathline's freshman class are so enthusiastic about what they learned that they are taking "leadership roles" in telling other teachers about it.

The national math standards include not only guidelines for content to be covered but also techniques for teaching it effectively. Among other things, the standards urge teachers to let groups of students come up with their own methods of solving problems, rather than memorizing procedures dictated from the blackboard.

In the first-year evaluation he prepared for PBS last summer, Rockman said that teachers reported "a substantial increase in their confidence" to select math-learning activities "that will engage students' interest and intellect." After working in Mathline, they're "much more likely" to encourage students' reasoning and ingenuity [see comment in sidebar] rather than rely on memorization and mechanistic procedures.

The percentage of teachers using the traditional combo of textbook, lecture and standardized tests dropped from 29 percent to 21 percent between winter and spring last year.

Mathline's online service and the 25 video modules--mostly delivered on sets of videocassettes, but broadcast overnight for off-air taping by some stations--proved to be a winning combination. The videos stimulated discussion online and the online service supplemented them with written lesson plans as well as person-to-person and group interaction.

The videos give teachers a rare opportunity to observe a variety of imaginative colleagues "modeling" how they teach math concepts and implement the new teaching standards to real-life students.

Mathline's middle-school video modules were produced under the direction of Ruth Ann Burns at WNET in New York, who will also oversee 20 modules each for K-6 math and K-6 science, with production help from the state networks in Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland and South Carolina.

In Rockman's survey, teachers said the video lessons had the greatest impact, rating them 2.07, toward the top of a 1-to-7 scale, and the online discussions rated 3.36.

Medium is message, again

Rockman's survey found that, during an average week, 52 percent of the teachers used the e-mail at least once, 35 percent participated in online discussions, 20 percent downloaded lesson guides and 10 percent posted materials on the national bulletin board.

Teachers went online to talk about the need to start everyone in algebra by 8th grade, which textbook to use, how to group students, how to assess student progress other than with tests, and the joys of fast modems.

Computers turned out to be a big part of the message as well as the medium. Many math teachers themselves were unschooled in the ways of computers, so the chance to get online was a major attraction, according to Rockman.

But technology didn't surrender its benefits without a fight. Arranging the computer and phone connection to put the teachers online was a taxing struggle in many places, and some stations were better able to help than others, says Rockman. At the most successful sites, station staffers took an active role in pursuing solutions to teachers' problems, he found.

"We're trying to make principals more accountable to get equipment they said they would," says Marge Wilsman, director of educational research and evaluation at Wisconsin PTV. Hookup problems and pokey modems get a spotlight in quarterly progress reports that Wisconsin PTV issues for each teacher. To build support for hookups, Wilsman wants to start putting principals online, too.

For the online work, PBS supplied FirstClass, the bulletin board software that it also uses for the network's internal PBS Express system. But for next school year the service will also be equally accessible through a password-protected Web site on the Internet, according to Kruter.

The aspect of Mathline that got the poorest reaction from teachers was the closest to traditional broadcasting: the national satellite teleconferences offered by PBS. They will be discontinued, according to Kruter. In Rockman's survey, teachers gave the videoconference a lowly average rating of 6.59 on a scale of 1 to 7.

"It's difficult to have audio interaction when you've got 500 or more people out there," says Kruter. "You just don't get your question answered." They also interrupt the class schedule, and require teachers to find substitutes, Goldstein points out.

The teleconferences worked best where stations added in-person meetings to the event, says Rockman. One such place was Pensacola, where WSRE created a full-day kickoff event with workshops and computer vendors' displays. Teachers "felt like pioneers," liked the recognition and were glad to see businesspeople and their principals there. When Walters asked whether the videoconference alone would have been worth attending, she got "a resounding no."

Self-sufficiency in volume

At first PBS required participating stations to enroll at least 25 teachers, but stations have recruited many more. The Pensacola station, for example, had 30 teachers the first year (24 of whom came back for the second) and signed on 52 more for 1995. Wisconsin PTV started with 63 teachers and now enrolls 120, according to Wilsman.

The numbers could be much larger if funding permitted, but PBS could get grants to cover only the $3 million startup of Mathline. PBS is now looking for a similar amount to launch ScienceLine. Operating costs have come out of $500-per-teacher annual fees, usually paid by school districts. Participating stations keep $125 from each fee, says Wilsman.

The relatively big Wisconsin project is coming close to covering expenses, she says. "If we could get our volume up to 500, 600, 800 people, then we'd be okay." Wisconsin and other state networks must also overcome the high cost of tollfree phone connections to put teachers online around the state.

Though $500 is a big out-of-pocket cost for a school district, it is "modest" for a year-long service, says Rockman. "Some got their $500 worth and more." Other teachers would do better taking structured classes.

PBS wants to gradually develop a full range of services akin to Mathline for various areas of curriculum, says Goldstein. Funders will be harder to find for language arts and social studies projects than for math and science, but she thinks a compelling case can be made.

National standards projects are perking along in several areas, though the history standards collided with the Culture War and are being revised. PBS has begun talking with the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association, says Goldstein. A draft of English teaching standards was published last fall.

But even the language arts standards may arouse controversy. Some parents and teachers still prefer to teach reading by having students sound out the phonics rather than try to understand from context. State legislators have passed a law mandating phonics in Kentucky and proposed such a law in Wisconsin, according to Wilsman.

National standards for teaching the arts, civics and geography were published in 1994.