Illustrative Mathematics
Illustrative Mathematics (IM) began in 2011 as a 12-month project to write mathematics tasks to illustrate the newly released Common Core State Mathematics Standards. Ten years later, it is a non-profit organization with 45 employees and over 150 contractors supporting K-12 teachers across the United States. IM has released both middle and high school open education resource (OER) mathematics curricula that are freely available, and will release an elementary OER mathematics curriculum in 2021. IM provides professional learning in mathematics for thousands of K-12 teachers each year, and reached approximately 450,000 students in the US in 2019. In this talk, I will share what we have learned about impacting the mathematical education of K-12 students at scale, and our plans for extending our work in the future.
Kristin Umland is co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Illustrative Mathematics, where she oversees the development of K-12 mathematics curriculum and professional learning for teachers. In 1996, she received her PhD in mathematics from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She worked for many years in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at the University of New Mexico. She initially focused on undergraduate mathematics education where she taught everything from Intermediate Algebra to Measure Theory, then shifted later to K-12 mathematics education. She has contributed to various research projects in mathematics education, taught pre-service and in-service elementary and secondary teachers, and conducted education outreach at the local, state, and national level. A recipient of both the Louise Hay Award for Contributions to Mathematics Education and the American Mathematical Society’s 2017 award for Impact on the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics, her goal has always been to improve the mathematical and pedagogical quality of students' learning experiences