IAS Park City Mathematics Institute

By Herb Clemens 

The PCMI Secondary School Teachers Program, whose 2011 theme was “Making Mathematical Connections,” has become a premier professional-development program for math teachers.

The Institute for Advanced Study’s Park City Mathematics Institute (PCMI) has run a summer program for secondary school mathematics teacher-leaders since 1994. About fifty nationally selected secondary mathematics teachers participate in the three-week institute each year. Gradually over the years, the program, with its three components —doing mathematics, reflecting on practice, and becoming a resource to colleagues and the profession—has developed into one of the premier programs for the professional development of mathematics teachers in the United States. It is argu­ably unsurpassed in overall quality.

However, the small numbers of teachers that can be served directly by this program, together with its sizable cost (long supported by the National Science Foundation), have brought the program to a crossroads of sorts. The PCMI Secondary School Teachers Program must either increase its influence on national mathematical development at the secondary level or reduce the cost of its program and so, inevitably, its quality.
Happily, the program arrives at this crossroads at a most fortuitous moment in our nation’s educational history. The reason for this is the advent of the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSSM), a common set of norms for curriculum and practice at each grade level, that has been voluntarily agreed to by forty-four of the fifty states. (Readers wishing to familiarize themselves with the content of CCSSM are referred to www.corestandards.org.)