Student Buy-In, Islamic Art, Workshop Resources

Dear Colleagues, Friends, & Supporters,

We hope you had a great summer! We just got back from a traveling workshop to NYC at Borough of Manhattan Community College. It was wonderful to work with Annie Han and her colleagues!

Drs. Phil DeOrsey and Christine von Renesse wrote two blogs this month, one about student buy-in and student resistance and one about their activity using Islamic Geometry.

We have also spent some time this summer to organize the many traveling workshop resources we have found or developed over the last years. Maybe they can be helpful to others when they are planning IBL workshops. Of course we always love feedback!

Also, the New England IBL Community will be coming together for their 2019 conference on Saturday October 19, in case you are part of (or close to) this area.

Happy semester start,

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.

We always love having visitors. Let us know if you are interested in visiting us at Westfield, or if you would like to host a traveling IBL workshop.

Student Buy-in and Student Resistance

In this blog, Phil DeOrsey and Christine von Renesse describe ideas behind student resistance and student buy-in. A great resource is Tolman’s book “Why Students resist learning: A practical model for understanding and helping students”. He uses the Integrated Model of Student Resistance to explain how metacognition, cognitive development, negative classroom experiences, and environmental forces (work, family, culture/racism, disabilities) influence student resistance. It is tempting to think that student behavior only results from our facilitation during class but that is rarely the case.

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Using Islamic Geometry for Student Buy-In

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.

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