A Perfect Presentation has Mistakes

Posted on: 
Tuesday, July 11, 2017 - 3:25pm

Dear Colleagues, Friends, & Supporters,

In this month's blogs, Volker and Chrissi describe how they taught for the first time Algebraic Geometry using student readings and presentations. In this context we also contemplate how to adjust our rubrics so that mistakes are being valued more.

This summer, we continue to think deeply about how to facilitate IBL workshops best -- depending on audiences, levels and specific goals. While three long IBL workshops are happening this summer, Chrissi is facilitating short IBL workshops in Germany, and we are getting ready for several IBL workshops in the US in the fall.

We hope you are enjoying your summer! Sincerely,

Julian Fleron, Phil Hotchkiss, Volker Ecke, & Christine von Renesse.

p.s. In case you have missed it: our website now allows faculty to create a free account and access teacher materials to some of our books. We are working on completing the teacher materials for all the books. Please have a look and tell us what you think.

Beautiful image of a surface developed for a student project.

In this blog, I reflect on the experiences Chrissi and I had with teaching an advanced mathematics course with a strong focus on students reading and presenting mathematics.

I have seen in the classroom how students’ conceptual understanding grows out of getting lost, feeling confused and making mistakes. Yet at the end, I still tend to “tell” students to not make mistakes anymore or at least not to repeat mistakes. How? By assessing their learning with presentations, tests, written homework, and final exams using rubrics that give the highest score to the work that has no mistakes... So how can I avoid sending mixed messages and create better rubrics and assessments?