One part traditionalism, one part standardized (roughly) curriculum, and one part student anxiety. You’ve got the teacher in the small high school with no one to talk to, the teacher working in a department full of people near retirement, and the Algebra 1 teacher who lives and dies by standardized test scores all looking for something, anything, that could make them more successful. The internet was a natural outlet.

Is there a correlation between the type of person who teaches math and the type who is more inclined to trust the internet? No idea.

My guess is that I’m not the only one wanting to change and needing to find help on the Internet because of a lack of support at my school site.

I feel like that out of all content areas, math has the most room for creative innovations to deepen understanding. There are endless ways to explore concepts, and their interconnections. Each new permutation and combination is a light-bulb moment. This leads to more curriculum creation, and amazingly high levels of engagement. There are only so many strategies one can adopt in teaching language or geography.

IMHO, there are two more subjects/disciples/content-areas that have the kind of characteristics that math has. Computer Science and arts. I think a CS community for teachers is going to explode in coming years, aided by all the stuff made by the tech community. Arts also has endless depth and exploration – I wonder what it would take for teachers to come together on the web for that.

All that said, having very closely try to understand MTBoS from an outsider perspective, I think there are other things that made it tick. Some of them are:
– The early innovators, including yourself, took to the web to talk about ideas actively, and actively sought a community. You folks were also masters or masters-in-the-making at math; it’s hard to believe that a few great science teachers organically start writing thoughtful reflections on their life in blogposts. This really helped solidify grounds for a critical mass later. The people really mattered.
– Several of you have had a love for math for decades, and many even went to college / grad-school to study math. Your love for your discipline is a strong indicator of why you care. Teachers generally have mixed backgrounds in college.
– The universal-ness of math. I know it’s been written about, but this can’t be stated enough.

What you have going is VERY VERY special, and it should be a case study for education worldwide.

Not quite an answer to your question, but relevant:

Some years ago, I gave a talk at the California Math Council meeting in Asilomar, on teacher collaboration. It was packed, and went really well, but a recurring question from attendees was: “what can I do if my colleagues don’t want to collaborate?” That planted a seed in my mind: we need an online collaboration space for math teachers.

With Carlos C and others I set up a group on edWeb, called Escape from the Textbook! It grew rapidly to about 400 online members. We had a successful conference in SF (sold out: 100 people, speakers were Jo Boaler and Paul Zeitz, plus many teacher-led sessions.) We held quarterly or so meetings in the Bay Area. (The mtbosBA meeting format was inherited from that.) There was a bit of sharing and collaboration in the edWeb community.

But after a very few years, the group collapsed. Traffic stopped in the edWeb community, and the in-person meeting which had peaked at about 20+ people gradually shrank.

Also Twitter is probably a better format for communicating. You miss some messages? So be it. Most Escapees relied on e-mail to keep in touch with the group. Those messages sat in inboxes until they were dealt with. As if we didn’t have enough e-mail…

There’s also a critical mass issue: MTBoS is probably more robust because it’s so large. People can drown in their school work for a few months, but the group keeps going, and when they re-emerge, it’s still there.

Thanks to #MTBoS I was inspired to finally launch my own blog after 21 years of teaching. The support and encouragement of the community is incredible and I am so thankful for the opportunity to grow my PLN every day.

I’m totally novice. I enrolled in 2016 blogging initiative. For me it’s an amazing things that math teacher make a community. For knowing the why, perhaps we could think about how it was started. I don’t know. I started following you, Dan, and then via your blogroll I discovered more people with similar ideas. And then, I discovered the MTBoS. Perhaps historical people like you can tell us how it started. And perhaps we could understand so.

Personally, I *need* MTBoS and MTBoS-friendly initiatives, like 3-acts compilations, Estimatiojn 180 and so. These things give us a light of how to teach differently. And you (plural) give it *practically* not theorically, like a tons of books and articles do.

I teach in small community with a lack of initiative and it’s promising see breathing new airs…. MTBoS is almost the only alternative source I have.

Thanks a lot, all of you, involved in MTBoS community.

I echo Nathan and Eric’s comments. Also interesting to read this in conjunction with this article in edweek: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2016/02/where_are_teachers_getting_their_common_core_materials.html -many teachers get most of their materials locally or make it themselves, but more math and ELA teachers are open to getting them from ‘outside organizations’! Like the Internet!

I’m a total novice, new to teaching and new to MTBOS, but I love it. I agree with Nathan — I struggle to find other teachers in my real life world that are energized and experimental. I like taking risks in the classroom and developing flexibility, and the MTBOS is FULL OF THAT. I owe a great deal to this community of math teachers, my algebra classroom thrives because of them.

I wonder what percentage of math teachers engage with the MTBoS?

Here’s a research article suggesting that one of the primary reasons teachers participate in online communities about teaching is to fulfill social and emotional needs.

http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ835241.pdf

It could be that Math teachers have the most to gain socially and emotionally due to a lower than ideal number of relationships in their local environments.

One may argue that this theory would result in a higher than average number of blogs for math teachers, which would disagree with Dan’s google search bar graph. This isn’t necessarily the case. Maybe Math teachers are less likely to engage socially in any form (including online), but when they do engage online, they find the camaraderie more irresistible because of a previous deficit. This causes them to engage more frequently and more emotionally, which begets real friendships and meaningful collaborations.

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Another factor that almost certainly plays into Math teachers topping the “quality” list when it comes to online engagement is our highly above average technical facility with computers and their language, which are the tools that create online environments.

Perhaps one reason for the success of MTBoS is the isolation of innovative math teachers in schools where the dominant culture is, well, the dominant traditionalist culture. There is a significant gap between the professional consensus (e.g. NCTM positions) and the actual practice in most classrooms. Is the same true in other disciplines?

I would only add that there is a subversive, anti-establishment quality to the MTBoS that I find attractive. By establishment I mean pretty much all the kind of traditional math instruction I received when I was in school, the kind that made me hate math and feel stupid in math class, which by the way is similar to the instruction my children are receiving today. I see the MTBoS as an opposing force.

I have an alternate hypothesis.

There are a variety of different content areas and a variety of different platforms for connecting people across those content areas.

It looks like, from our rough analysis and from our somewhat insider perspectives, that the math education community on Twitter and Blogs is somewhat more robust than other online communities using the same platforms.

1. Is it possible that this is not true with other online platforms? For example, could ELA communities exist with greater depth than the equivalent math ed communities on Facebook?

2. Is it possible that really what we are seeing is natural variation in online communities that tend to segregate around content areas and that when we see the MTBoS seemingly being more successful, we are attempting to explain natural variation using non-causal relationships?

I wonder if one reason we have such a wide variety in responses to your question is that we are attempting to find a causal relationship where none might exist?

I’m a bit late to the party, but would like to float the idea that one possible factor in the existence of the MTBoS is that the Math Forum has been around as an online math teacher community since 1992. I’m not an anthropologist or sociologist (though we have one who writes about the Math Forum), but hard to believe there isn’t some connection.

For those who only know us as folks who tweet and run Ignite events, you might check out this informal history I wrote after participating in a panel convened by Lani Horn: http://mathforum.org/blogs/annie/2014/05/07/the-math-forum-the-original-social-network-for-math-teachers/

I confess, Dan, that as I quickly read your response to Annie it seems that you are saying that the 2016 version of the Math Forum is an angry place and that you’re sad when you visit us. As you might imagine, that hurt my heart.

As I re-read, I’m thinking that it’s really “math-teach” that is the angry place that makes you sad when you visit it. Or, at least, that’s what I’m hoping.

The 1992 version (when it was the Geometry Forum) was founded on the idea of offering “an online math education community center.” We have continued that mission for 24 years nows (although, we’ve had a bit of a hiccup since the staff left Drexel on June 30th but all of the legal paperwork we hope will be signed soon. We are so excited to be part of NCTM!).

One way that we serve the community is to provide places/opportunities for conversations. Math-teach is one of those places. I wonder what might be done so that it isn’t an angry place. Do you or others have ideas?

You’ve basically hit my research question =) . . . a tough one for sure! At this point, I think it has to be studied as a collective phenomenon rather than from the perspective of individuals. This collective is by far the most productive and creative body I have ever experienced!