Faculty Blog

In this blog, Prof. von Renesse describes how she structured her remote synchronous classes in Fall 2020. There are many great ways to do that, but hopefully there are ideas here that also work for you. She provides different resources like google docs and jamboards, as well as video clips from her classes. While most of the resources in this blog are specific to the Discovering the Art of Mathematics books, Prof. von Renesse used basically the same set-up for her calculus class and her graduate class for teachers.

 

The purpose of this blog is to engage you in thinking about some aspects of planning events for your IBL community, as well as providing you with the activities the New England region (NE-IBLM) has offered over the last 2 years.

In this blog, Elizabeth Azinheira describes how reading the book "Routines for Reasoning" and implementing the ideas has changed her teaching. In her intervention classroom, Liz carefully designs lessons that allow all her students to work at their learning edges. Liz was supported in making these changes by Dr. Christine von Renesse in a graduate course by special arrangement which included weekly video meetings and several classroom observations. After telling her personal story, Liz provides an overview of the routines and makes some of her lesson plans available for others to use.
 
 

In this blog Drs Phil DeOrsey and Christine von Renesse describe an activity that is especially helpful in getting student buy-in. We let the students explore Islamic Geometry -- they create designs using compass and straight edge, as well as using Geogebra . For their final "achievement" we explain two different ways of exhibiting student artwork.

There’s a famous line that many people use when they describe teaching. “Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I’ll remember, involve me and I’ll understand.” I’ve always loved that quotation. I’ve tried to base my teaching style on it, like most teacher’s I’ve met or worked with have as well. But it wasn’t until recently that I actually knew what that meant. Or how powerful it can be.
 

Over the last years I have offered a course about inquiry-based learning to graduate students. These students are usually teachers that are working full-time in their own classroom while completing their professional licensure and master’s program. In this blog I will explain how I run the course and, more importantly, you can read about the journey to inquiry of two teachers that worked with me this semester.

In this blog we invite the reader to think deeply about professional development opportunities for faculty. The focus of this professional development is to improve teaching by including more inquiry in the mathematics classroom. Our hope is that faculty developing professional development will use some of our ideas to create new opportunities that lead to transformational change and deep conceptual learning about teaching.
 
 

There were several things I didn’t like about grading...I didn’t like agonizing about the exact number of points to give, grading homework felt more summative than formative to me and I wasn’t sure if students learned from my written comments. I was also confused about the fact that a “B” could look many different ways. Then I read the book “Specifications Grading” by Linda B. Nilson. While this book doesn’t focus on mathematics it gave me lots of ideas and the goal to change what I am doing...

My goal for this blog post is for you to get a sense of my philosophy and approach to one of the most enjoyable courses I teach; as well as to highlight how an IBL (inquiry-based learning) approach to the course is fundamental for the learning goals that I and my institution have for the course. You can download some of my explorations.
 
 

In this blog, Brian Katz is connecting beautifully the issues of equity and teaching using inquiry. He also promotes a special edition of PRIMUS which focuses specifically on inquiry-based teaching and learning.
 

This Fall (2016) the 13 students in my honors mathematical explorations class embarked on the journey of understanding some mathematical ideas behind maypole dancing. In this blog you can find some videos about maypole dancing, student work proving our conjectures and a beautiful writing project by Sarah Dunn about mathematics, running and maypole dancing.