Editor’s Note: This is one of a series of profiles of the Wisconsin Idea in action. See past profiles we have published.

Talk with Terry Millar long enough and it’s bound to happen: The mathematics professor will begin drilling you in math. He’ll slip in a question such as “What is pi?” and before you know it you’re being coached to a whole new level of mathematical understanding.

Linda McQuillen refers to it as having Millar “attend to her mathematics” and as his long-time collaborator she’s well acquainted with the experience.

Mathematics professor Terry Millar helped develop the Math Masters program, a series of workshops for middle-school teachers designed to help them grasp the logic behind mathematical rules, instead of simply memorizing them.

Photo: Bryce Richter

“Traveling with him [to meetings] and when we’d do presentations for various audiences, on the cab rides to and from the airport, we were always doing mathematics,” laughs McQuillen, a retired math teacher and a former leader of the Madison school district’s math goals. “The problem is, Terry can do it verbally and I can’t. He’s just amazing.”

If Millar’s enthusiasm for teaching math can be overwhelming, it’s also true he has put the energy to good use. For well over a decade, Millar has worked to improve math and science instruction for students at all levels by bringing together the knowledge of university mathematicians and scientists with the teaching and curricular expertise of educators.

Befitting his position as a professor and associate dean, this work has often taken the form of major campuswide initiatives and research projects. In the late 1990s, for instance, Millar and others on campus launched the K-Through-Infinity (KTI) program, which teamed UW–Madison faculty and graduate students with math and science teachers in the Madison schools, and placed graduate students in classrooms as teaching fellows.

What’s more, in 2003, a team led by Millar and the Wisconsin Center for Education Research received a multimillion-dollar National Science Foundation grant to conduct a math and science education experiment called SCALE (Systemwide Change for All Learners and Educators) in four major school districts around the country, including Madison’s. During the past five years, SCALE researchers in education, science, math and engineering have been developing new models of partnership between postsecondary institutions and K–12 schools, with the goal of creating better science and math learning environments for kids and measuring their effect on student learning.

But Millar’s dedication extends far beyond the big projects, says McQuillen; over the years, he has also personally assisted the Madison school district in countless ways. For example, when the district hoped to engage UW–Madison mathematicians in redesigning its algebra and geometry courses, Millar found faculty who were willing to help. His support and advice also proved invaluable when the district faced intense opposition to its new program of “reform” mathematics.

“That’s just Terry,” says McQuillen, “He was always communicating that he was at our service — that if we needed him, we could call on him. In every way, we felt he was an ally to our district goal of making mathematics better for all kids, and opening up the field to more diverse learners.”

Still, K–12 education isn’t something that research mathematicians normally tackle. So why take it on? Millar believes that if we ever hope to solve today’s most pressing challenges in math and science — including the flagging achievement of U.S. students, and the dearth of women and minorities in these fields — change can’t happen at one level alone. Instead, coordinated reform needs to go on everywhere: from elementary schools to community colleges to research universities.

“To really improve the situation, institutions need to change in concert — not necessarily in lockstep — but they need to be moving in the same direction,” Millar says. He likens it to a bunch of molecules in a room. “If they’re just zipping around independently, nothing changes. But if they all start to move just a teensy bit in the same direction, then you get a wind and produce a force. And that’s a very different phenomenon: You can do work with that.”

One of the best examples of this approach came into being a few years ago, when the Madison school district started promoting a curriculum of “reform” mathematics. Reformed math aims to give students a more conceptual understanding of mathematics by emphasizing discovery over rote learning. It also demands more of teachers, requiring them not only to know the mathematical rules cold, but also the logic and meaning behind them. And the district soon realized that many middle-school teachers weren’t necessarily up to it.

“Most everyone who is teaching today came through a very traditional mathematics program, and some not as successfully as we would have liked,” says McQuillen. “So we needed them not only to beef up their math, but also to look at the field more conceptually, because that was our goal for kids.”

The solution devised by Millar and the district’s former director of teaching and learning, Mary Ramberg, was a series of professional development workshops that would be created and taught not just by district staff, but by UW–Madison science, math and engineering faculty as well. Millar soon assembled a team composed of himself, mechanical engineering professor Nicola Ferrier, and math professors David Griffeath and Bob Wilson (others joined later). On the district side, McQuillen and math teacher Brian Sniff — now the district’s math coordinator — were tapped to provide the teaching expertise and facilitate the sessions.

In the Math Masters workshops that evolved, middle-school teachers would begin working a math problem at the middle-school level, and then be coached to examine it at a high-school or even college level. With the professors on hand to supply the mathematical theory and reasoning, participants were able to grasp the logic behind rules that before they had simply memorized, says Millar. And for many, it was a revelation.

“It was safe not to know everything. We talked and we laughed and we’d say, ‘Oh, wow, look how that works,’” says Laura Godfrey, a Math Masters participant from Wright Middle School in Madison. “Why didn’t anybody ever tell me that before?”

All told, more than 150 teachers attended 19 Math Masters workshops between 2004 and 2006, taking away with them a significantly improved knowledge of math — and a greater confidence. Godfrey reports that now when kids come up with a different strategy for attacking a math problem, she feels comfortable letting them explore it, rather than bringing them back immediately to the “right” way to solve it.

“My flexibility is so much better now, because I understand the math,” she says.

Although Math Masters wrapped up in 2006 when the grant support for it ended, its success has spawned two new projects: a Science Masters program for middle-school science teachers and a Math Masters initiative targeted to elementary teachers. The Math Masters model is also slowly spreading beyond Wisconsin. In her retirement, McQuillen collaborates with professors at two University of California campuses to provide similar trainings to the Los Angeles school district. Meanwhile, many others across the country have learned about the program’s effectiveness at educational conferences and meetings.

Even so, Millar knows it will take years for the sweeping reforms he envisions to happen on a large scale. But he’s not giving up anytime soon.

“For me, I’m hoping that a couple hundred years from now, people would no more say, ‘I’m not very good at math,’ than they would say, ‘I’m not very good at reasoning,’ or ‘I’m not very good at being a human,’” he says. “Because that’s all mathematics is; it’s reasoning.”

Remember that, should Millar ever start to drill you.