Large classes come with more logistical challenges, but using IBL in these contexts is still doable and rewarding. It's not the same as small classes, but many good things can happen in large classes. Check out the podcast episode below!
The IBL Blog
The IBL Blog focuses on promoting the use of inquiry-based learning methods in college mathematics classrooms. Learn more about IBL at The Academy of Inquiry Based Learning
Thursday, February 15, 2024
Saturday, January 6, 2024
Robin Wilson Interview on the IBL Podcast
It's my great pleasure to have the opportunity to talk to Robin Wilson, Loyola Marymount University. This is episode we talked about the Algebra Project and its impact on students, and the connection to math literacy as a civil right.
Robin shared his insights about working with students, teachers, and how Bob Moses saw the need to plant seeds for a larger effort to help all students have a quality education.
More information about the Algebra Project is available via their website: www.algebra.org. Want to get involved? Email ben@algebra.org
Bob Moses' wrote a book with Charles E. Cob, Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project. 2002. ISBN 9780807031278, Penguin Random House.
Liu, G. (2006). Education, Equality, and National Citizenship. The Yale Law Journal, 116(2), 330–411. https://doi.org/10.2307/20455723
Tuesday, October 17, 2023
Podcast: A conversation with Carol Schumacher, Kenyon College
It was great catching up with Carol Schumacher, Kenyon College. Carol and I have worked together off and on for over a decade. It's been wonderful to learn from Carol and work with her on moving education at the college level forward.
Huge congrats to Carol for receiving the Haimo Award in 2023. See the info HERE.
Link mentioned in the video: IDEAL Center https://new.smm.org/ideal-center
IDEAL Center Teamwork Norms
- Everyone has something to learn.
- No one person is good at everything or has all the skills to complete a team-worthy task
- Everyone has expertise to offer.
- Every person has relevant strengths to bring to each team-worthy task.
- You have the right to ask for help, and the duty to assist. • We need each other.
- Help others do things for themselves.
- Explain by telling how.
- Everybody helps.
- Pay attention to what other team members need.
Saturday, September 9, 2023
IBL Teaching Podcast on YouTube
I'm launching a new podcast on YouTube to share stories and useful tips about IBL Teaching. The podcast will focus on a range of topics from interviewing faculty about IBL to specific skills or practices in IBL. We talk about math in higher education, but will expand beyond. The plan is to drop an episode about once a month, hopefully more frequently if my role as undergrad chair doesn't take up too much time.
The first three episodes are linked below. We start "at home" with two great people who have been working with me for more than a decade, and a short video about the IBL handout approach.
Have a question or suggestion for a topic? Let me know at stan at math dot toronto dot edu.
Matt Jones, CSU Dominguez Hills
Dana Ernst, Northern Arizona University
IBL Handout Approach
Tuesday, February 21, 2023
Email mentoring after a professional development workshop (for professional developers)
This primarily audience for this post is professional developers in higher education.
After a workshop in the early part of the summer, attendees go back home... and then the calendar unceremoniously flips to August. Fall semester is approaching, and summer is ending. All of the ideas learned at the summer workshop have to intersect with reality. Real students are coming, the syllabus needs to be written, choices need to be made, and the LMS needs to be set up. During this phase instructors new or newish to IBL can benefit from the community they worked with at the workshop.
Email mentoring doesn't sound exciting. It sounds like "having to mow the lawn after a long week." I apologize for the unexciting, descriptive title. But in reality email mentoring is important for participants and truly rewarding and fun.
What is email mentoring? Email mentoring is follow-up support after workshops, and is organized by workshop facilitators. Facilitators email the whole group every two or three weeks to check-in on the group, asking participants to share how planning or teaching is going. Participants have questions before the start of the term, and issues or questions might come up during the term, or they may have a success story to share with the group.
A typical pattern is the facilitators send out a few emails to see how people are doing, and a few responses trickle in. But then eventually there are times when you get large threads. Someone has a question. Another participant chimes in. And then another chime. A facilitator thanks the people who chimed in, and asks for more thoughts. More people chime in, and it's a flurry of helpful, insightful, and supportive messages.
Activity ebbs and flows within a semester. Email mentoring starts a few weeks before the term and is heavily used during the parts of the first half of the term. Activity tends to pick up again towards the end of the term, when facilitators encourage participants to share and reflect on the semester.
Email mentoring is a type of follow-up support. Follow-up support is a broad category of continuing professional development after the main workshop. Follow-up is the booster to the summer prime doses, and strengthens and enhances what was accomplished in the summer.
One common example of follow-up support is having monthly meetings, which is more common for professional development programs that take place in a specific region, such as a single campus or in the K-12 setting of a school or school district.
Meeting regularly during the school year makes sense in cases where all the instructors are in the same geographic area. You can continue to support workshop participants as they are implementing their courses, get together over boxed lunches, and get folks outside of their environments. Video conference call is another option to do this for groups that are more spread out.
Email mentoring especially makes sense for undergraduate math instructors, because of the asynchronous nature of email. Everyone uses email, and access to the conversation fits into faculty work life. Scheduling faculty meetings is also a big challenge, because finding a common time across multiple time zones with 20-30 faculty is nearly impossible. Hence, asynchronous email exchanges make sense in this context.
Email mentoring also does not require prep like the summer workshops. The main thing is being effective with timing and being kindly persistent and supportive. Thinking about this work as building community rather than "getting lots of chimes" is a more useful mindset.
Why is follow-up support important? As mentioned above, learning about IBL, active learning, or any other topic during the summer is great for getting over the "activation energy" needed to start the change. But implementation in the real world requires steady work, and having a community of collaborators doing the same thing can make a difference in how much and how well someone implements new teaching changes (to them). In some instances, follow-up support can make or break an implementation attempt. I think of follow-up support as an important part of the workshop.
Some people are teaching in departments where they are the only one doing active learning. They feel isolated, and going to a workshop for a week is a refreshing change. Having their community still with them during the term via email mentoring gives folks working alone much needed support and camaraderie.
How do you ping the groups? We use low-entry, high-ceiling prompts.
"Hi everyone,
Hope your week is off to a good start. Please let us know how things are going with your teaching. Even if you don't have a lot of time, please feel free to click 'reply-all' and send us just a sentence or two. We want to know how you are doing.
Cheers!
SY"
The idea is to make participating easy and it can be a short update or something more involved.
Sometimes the facilitators send out informational emails, and they usually don't get many replies, although they can spark a thread on a topic usually not directly related to the original information being shared. Perhaps there is a good article worth sharing or a conference or workshop coming up. Those kinds of messages keep the community informed and in people's minds.
Repeatedly checking in the with group is necessary. Sometimes it takes a multiple tries to get a thread going. This is normal and fine. Not every email needs or should have a lengthy response from a large number of participants. The strategy is to gently check in regularly, because eventually someone will want or need to run something by the group, and you'll have primed people that chiming in is okay and welcome.
Emotional content is a key component of successful email mentoring. What does emotional content mean in this context? Examples are thanking people for sharing, validating the struggle, and celebrating successes. Here's an example.
"Hi ABC - thank you for sharing that story. I have been in that situation before several times, and you handled it better than I did the first time. Here's what I learned along the way... Does anyone else have anything to share? Please chime in - it'd be great if we had more perspectives. - SY"
Emotional content is often short and sweet.
(Participant) "Hi everyone! Just had a great day in class..."
(Another participant) "That's wonderful!..."
(Facilitator) "Thank you so much for sharing that story. Congrats!"
(More compliments...)
One thing to keep in mind is timing. You want other participants to chime in, so facilitators need to carefully time their messages so they are not pouncing on all of the questions right away or letting big gaps of time go by. Perhaps they can let a day or two go by and encourage someone to chime in. Facilitators can chime in with, "That's a great question. Does someone have something they'd like to share?" to amplify the question without answering.
Why email and not slack/discord/teams? I personally would prefer to use something like Discord or a discussion board. But the reality is that you lose people from the group post workshop if you use slack/discord/teams/etc. Only a subset will take the extra step to login and check another platform that is not email. This has been an consistent barrier for all the years I have run workshops. Email is the one consistent way to reach everyone.There are definitely pros and cons to email, but in the end, the kicker is that email is the one universal platform out there that everyone already uses.
Email mentoring is fun and rewarding! Email mentoring is great, because you get to learn about what people are doing, help people with their questions, be part of a supportive community, learn new ideas, and celebrate successes. It's many of the good parts of being an educator rolled into one activity.
Email mentoring is a helpful and fun strategy to implement follow-up mentoring post workshop, especially when working with busy faculty schedules. One way to think about it is that you already spent all that effort planning and running your workshop, and you want it to stick. One way to help ensure students experience the benefits of high-impact practices like IBL is to help your attendees when they are implementing your workshop ideas.
Want to learn more? Read Chuck and Sandra's paper super-detailed analysis of what we did to create a supportive community using feedback loops, which helped us achieve high response rates. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-018-0120-9
"This workshop for 35 college mathematics instructors used online and in-person communities to provide support to participants during the post-workshop period of “refreezing.” Almost all workshop attendees participated in “e-mentoring” (94%), primarily through a productive, engaging group email listserv. By combining qualitative coding of message content with the techniques of social network analysis, we reveal how facilitators and participants on the group listserv provided intellectual and emotional support, as well as positive reinforcement through feedback loops. The analysis also shows how the facilitators made this a helpful group and maintained participant engagement through frequent encouragement, deliberate community building, and thoughtfully timed responses."
Edit: One pitfall to avoid giving up too early. Sometimes you will send out an email and no one will respond. And then you try it again, and no one will respond. Don't give up. Keep on asking nicely, perhaps send out some info, or share something from your class, and end with open invitations.
Saturday, February 4, 2023
Simplicity
“Simplicity is an exact medium between too little and too much.“ - Joshua Reynold
One lesson I have learned from photography is the importance of simplicity. In photography, one point of view in composing a photo is the process of elimination. You eliminate objects in your frame until you feel like you have a compelling image.
Leaning Oak, Central Coast CA (copyright Stan Yoshinobu) |
A view of the larger scene |
"To truly cherish the things that are important to you, you must first discard those that have outlived their purpose." - Marie Kondo
Thursday, December 15, 2022
Presentation at AMATYC 2022: Equitable and Inclusive Teaching Practices
This blog post is an adaptation of a presentation I gave at AMATYC 2022, in Toronto, Ontario. Title of the presentation is “Equitable and Inclusive Teaching Practices”
The presentation is split into two parts. Part 1 is an outline of 4 lenses we can use to think about our teaching and more generally society. The second part is about teaching scenarios using the four lenses and our experiences.
First some caveats. There are more than four lenses. The four I chose are just viewpoints I chose that I find helpful in a workshop-like session. There are many other things to consider, which are beyond the scope of the presentation.
Lens 1: Math’s teeming shore
The first lens to use is about something I call the Math’s teeming shore.
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
In Emma Lazarus’ sonnet is the idea of all the people who were left out, gathered on the teeming shore yearning for a better life. In one subset of America, the ideal is to bring these people in and welcome them. In a similar way, so many people in Math have been left out. How many times have you heard, “I am not a math person” or “I am not good at math”?
Math education has left many on the outside, and this is a major problem for our society, because this damages our ability to be a more equitable and informed society. This brings us to the second lens...
Lens 2: math literacy as a civil right, implicit biases
From the seminal work of Bob Moses and the Algebra Project (https://algebra.org/wp/), we have the idea that math literacy is a critical literacy. In fact, math literacy is a civil right. Without an ability to think and evaluate some issues quantitatively and scientifically a person cannot fully exercise their rights and be a full citizen or have equal opportunities in society.
There is a fundamental paradox in education. Teaching people to think and problem solve is a good thing in my opinion, but not everyone would agree. If we teach people to think, then they start to question the system they live in. If we teach people to think, they start to become qualified for jobs they are not intended to have. In short that is why there exists Math’s teeming shore.
A brutal example from the past is The Native American Boarding Schools (https://www.theindigenousfoundation.org/articles/us-residential-schools). These schools designed to “assimilate” indigenous people via their children. Assimilate of course is a euphemism for genocide, and in 2021 the first of several discoveries of hundreds of remains of children at these schools were reported (Content Warning).
When people opine of the dearth of Indigenous people in STEM, one false myth some people use about this is that Indigenous youth are not interested in STEM, or that it’s falsely not part of their culture. Crucially what is left out as a possible explanation is our actual history. That in itself is an indictment. Further when people talk about culture, they are actually not talking about culture. They are really talking about power. One group had the power and the other didn’t, and that is how we got here.
The problem isn’t the Indigenous students or the black students or the women or whatever group you want to focus on. The problem is our history and our collective ignorance of it.
How do these things relate to teaching? History lives with us in ways we may not be aware of. For example, false assumptions can affect our daily work. If a student requests an extension for an assignment or doesn’t turn something in, then certain assumptions can be triggered depending on a student’s identity. A source of implicit bias goes down deep to underlying assumptions, norms, and conditioning that have formed us. Implicit biases are rooted in our history, and that impacts how we solve (or don’t solve) our problems with math literacy.
Lens 3: the shokunin or artisan spirit
I’d like to think that there’s a way out. What I’ve latched onto is starting at the core of what teaching is. A Shokunin is an artisan with great skill who also works for the benefit of their community. This idea applies to teaching. One way to deal with our equity and inclusion issues is to adopt a Shokunin spirit or artisan spirit when we teach.
When I started my career, I didn’t have a diversity statement in my syllabus. I didn’t intentionally think about equity in the classroom. I did not use IBL with an equity lens. These are things I have learned over time from people who have made the case that we need to do more.
This is one way our profession has moved forward. Some people have done the work to improve their courses and come together to form coalitions to courageously make the case to others for equity and inclusion in Math. From there new policies were adopted and more resources and attention are being directed to make progress.
Have we done enough? No, obviously. We have a lot more work to do. But the point still stands that if we think of our teaching practices like an artisan, we can continually improve our craft for the good of society. By teaching practices, I don’t just mean what we do in the classroom, but more broadly the system surrounding it. If enough of us do this work at different layers of the system, we can potentially make systemic change.
Lens 4: IBL methods
IBL can help with equity and inclusion, but only if the instructor focuses on these things. IBL methods are a pathway, not a panacea.
The artisan spirit should be connected to tools and practices that work. There is a body of scientific work that establishes IBL methods as effective in learning and leveling the playing field. Here’s a link to work by Laursen at al. I won't go into details of what IBL is or what the literature says, since these are well worn paths that have been talked about elsewhere.
Part 2: Scenarios
With these lenses in hand, we looked at a few scenarios at the session, and discussed what we could do. The second was a little more than half the session in terms of time, and participants offered good ideas for how we could move forward with their teaching. We discussed the ideas at our tables and then shared with the whole group, which was about 50 people.
Scenario 1: The same 3 or 4 students raise their hands first when it’s time for student volunteers. What can you do to make sharing more equitable?
Scenario 2: What are the positives and some pitfalls of randomly assigning groups of 3 or 4 students to work on a problem?
Scenario 3: In this scenario, put on your “implicit bias” lens. How can implicit biases and social frames amplify the comments left on student work? Compare the following two responses.
“Good start to a solution. I noticed that you didn’t use the definition of… Consider using the definition…”
“It’s obvious you didn’t do the reading or put in a good effort…”
Task 4: In the spirit of being like an artisan/shokunin with your teaching, consider how to improve/update…
Syllabus statement, pronouns, resources for marginalized groups
Course content
Deadlines (hard vs. flexible)
Assessment
Small groups, pairs
Students with disabilities/accessibility
Department/college level
Outro
Even for large classes, like the ones I teach at the University of Toronto, we do something significant with respect to equity and inclusion. I coordinate a course with 1500 students, split into 8 lecture sections, and 35 tutorials/recitations. We have 8 instructors, 24 TAs working together to provide an equitable and inclusive class. Large class sizes are not an obstacle for equitable and inclusive teaching, see the list below where most of the items are orthogonal to class size.
What are we doing?
Diversity statement in the syllabus, and visible inclusion in class, in Canvas announcements.
TA training on equity at the start of the term.
Teaching using IBL with a focus on equity.
Online option with recordings for students with disabilities.
Grading for growth to the extent possible, with group reports with resubmissions without penalty.
Offer online office hours.
Collect weekly feedback to adapt to students’ needs and to uncover issues that we can address early in the term.
Eliminating biased problems and images from previous iterations of the course.
Those are some of the things we have implemented, and these are just the start. We need to improve each of these items and create norms and a department culture where students feel they truly belong.
Each of us has some power as instructors. To the extent we have power, we should use it to do good in our classrooms and at our institutions. We should be the hope we want to see in the world.