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.
In this blog, Julian Fleron describes how he uses mathematical art to make his students think about racism, sexism, etc. Together with his students, he created a powerful piece of art to show that how we view each other depends on where we stand.
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.
