UTeach is our completely revised cross-college, secondary science, mathematics and computer science certification program now being scaled, with significant funding from the Exxon-Mobil Foundation, to more than a dozen universities and colleges around the country. Sometimes described as "the last man standing" from the College of Education to have served on the original cross-college Executive Steering Committee that brought the UTeach program into being, I can say with still-considerable enthusiasm that teaching in the UTeach program has been as much about learning from students and colleagues as it has been about any claim to be educating anyone else. Taking the strong position that the UTeach program needed to be deeply integrated with issues, innovations, research traditions and critical perspectives associated specifically with teaching and learning mathematic and science in our proudly diverse public schools, we developed a completely new set of courses for our students to take. When we began, there were no courses to be found anywhere (so far as we could tell, anyhow) like the suite of three, domain-focused, core courses that have come to be an essential component of UTeach program. The three core courses, all taught in the College of Education, are Knowing and Learning in Mathematics and Science, Classroom Interactions in Mathematics and Science, and Project-Based Instruction in Mathematics and Science. In the late 1990's I had the opportunity to develop and teach the very first version of the Knowing and Learning course. This version has evolved significantly in the intervening years as the direct result of the considerable contributions made by colleagues who co-developed and taught sections over the years (including Patrick Callahan. Lupita Carmona, Thomas Hills, and Stephen Greenstein, among many others). More recently I've taught a version of the Classroom Interactions course (developed with Susan Empson, Jill Marshal and others) and look forward to someday teaching PBI (first developed, and still taught, by Tony Petrosino). As part of this history, it is worth noting that many of the innovative content or "domain" courses now associated with the UTeach program (e.g., Functions and Modeling and Geometry and Visualization) were also first developed, and initially taught, in the College of Education. All of this is possible, we believe, because we continue to view this program and its development as closely associated with the research mission of The University. Thus we are both pleased and proud of the significant contribution the tenure-line faculty, graduate students and administration from the CoE have made to the collaborative, if not always facile, development of this remarkable program. Even before the scaling effort now supported, in part, by the UTeach Institute, UTeach was and is the largest, university-based, secondary mathematics and science certification program in the country. Collaboration certainly has its costs, but in the end what can emerge from a sincere and sustained commitment to becoming "more than the sum of our parts" can be said to have been worth it both at The University and, we hope, in the larger communities that higher education, especially public higher education, is to serve.

The Systemic Reform in Mathematics and Science course is a “capstone” experience in our graduate program and approaches understanding the processes of systemic reform in mathematics and science education through the lens and associated methodologies of systems theory. The course is meant to be broadly synthesizing and situating.  It is to be synthesizing because students are encouraged to bring together, make visible and attempt to apply much of what they have learned related to mathematics and science education. It to be situating because students are asked to think about how their activities, insights and levels of engagement might be seen to fit in and restructure the systems in which we all play an important role as we live out our personal and professional lives. 

Systems theory has various "schools" and this course will engage many of these with the goal of improving efforts to bring about and support content-specific reform in mathematics and science education.  Systems are considered dynamic entities where structure – as the dynamic interaction of parts, over time, with feedback, and where the "whole is more than the sum of the parts"– creates behavior.  To change the behavior of a system (e.g., to bring about reform) the structure must be understood, engaged and, potentially, altered.  Mental models and modeling play vital roles in systems discourse and systems methodologies, and thus will be the primary focus of our analyses and activities as we look to understand and advance systemic reform at various levels of personal, and group-level, interest and engagement.  The “hard” issues related to the dynamics of systemic reform, situated relative to our efforts to make better sense of systems theory as an approach, will frame our progression through the course.  In addition to working through the shared readings and assignments of the course, studens form project team will pursue an analysis of one of the hard issues of systemic reform from within a systems theoretical framework. Students develop working abilities related to three kinds of modeling tools associated with systems theory:  1) causal-loop diagrams, 2) finite-difference modeling, and 3) agent-based modeling.