Thank you for posting this video! It focuses on a critically important topic. I have several questions about your work that I also hope will catalyze additional questions and discussion during the coming week:

- Could you provide in this discussion stream some additional details about what participants actually do during the week of the professional development workshops? For example, do the workshops focus on a particular branch of math, such as calculus, or do the workshops ask participants to re-conceptualize how they want their students to think about math regardless of the specific subject matter?

- Please tell us more about the people who participate. Are they primarily focused on teaching general education courses, courses for math majors, pre-service teacher courses?

- Since much research has demonstrated that one-time workshops are largely ineffective in changing participant behavior over the long term, your addition of a year of follow-up seems critically important. What kinds of interactions does your program have with participants after the workshop has finished?

- Please provide some additional detail about how you measure IBL skills, knowledge, and intensity in the year(s) following the workshop. Are those data self-reported? Or do member of your teams observe the teaching of participants after they've completed the workshop?

Thank you!

 

hi Jay - 

a couple of notes to add to what Stan said. 

Re what happens at the workshop: The workshops include 4 main strands of activities based on research literature and long observation of instructors' needs as they enter IBL teaching. Video lesson study of IBL classrooms is the backbone that enables people to form a mental model of an IBL classroom and see some choices about how to pull it off in their own setting. They see what students can do, how instructors might handle various situations, and can discuss what might look different in different scenarios.  "Nuts and bolts" sessions cover the tactics and skills of IBL teaching, especially those that differ from lecture courses - how to plan and facilitate IBL lessons.  "Literature to practice" sessions offer some reading from the education literature or para-literature to give people a conceptual foundation and something to go on besides personal experience as a basis for their choices. This material also helps them defend those choices to colleagues or students.  Course planning time helps structure the work of planning an IBL course through a checklist of decisions to make and materials to gather or develop; people work alone or in small groups on their course, in a supported setting. 

Through all of this the workshops model inquiry into teaching to give participants a learning experience that is parallel to (but not the same as! ) students' experience of learning mathematics through inquiry. Lots of conversation, peer to peer interaction (with workshop peers as well as facilitator peers), reflection time, and good camaraderie.  Of course this is nice face to face, but as evaluators we were impressed with how well the model ported over to an online format last summer. A strength of this project (and indeed a deliberate element of it) has been to build capacity in faculty development for UG math education. The project has generated a crackerjack team of people who have very strong and portable facilitation skills, and they will continue to make an impact on the profession.

Re followup:  as Stan says, there is a lively IBL community that predates this project by many years, into which we can plug people, through a MAA (prof soc) interest group and more informal, community-based efforts. The email mentoring list for the first year supports new IBLers in implementing their first IBL course, and we have evidence that this support structure is very helpful in solving practical problems and providing moral support through the challenges of trying anything for the first time (see Hayward & Laursen, 2018). The trick is to use the list for discussion and collaborative problem-solving, not just information-sharing, and some of the tactics for that are shared in the paper.

Re measures: For IBL capacity, we use self-report measures of knowledge, skills, beliefs & motivation around IBL, administered repeatedly pre-workshop, immediate post, and about 1.5 years later. As evaluators we've used these for a long time and know a lot about how they behave; interestingly they don't seem to suffer from social desirability bias too much (maybe they will someday, and then we can claim we have a real cultural change!).   For IBL intensity, the self-report items focus on the extent to which instructors use specific teaching behaviors (e.g. students work in groups), and data from the email followup helps us triangulate these (see Hayward, Kogan & Laursen, 2016).

Observation is too expensive to use as the main evaluation method on this scale, but we have indeed gathered observation data to compare to the surveys. In general we find that they align fairly well -- that is, instructors can tell us what they do if we use fairly plain, behavioral language to ask them, and do not load it up with value judgments.  We're writing that work up now and will present some of it at the ASCN meeting in June (see talks by Hayward and Weston).

Thanks for this cool video.  Since we have been working on bio math integration for a long time...How have you incorporated thing like bio and math people working together?

Have you used thins like case based learning?  or social justice implications to grab student interest?

Thanks Stan

However there are a number of cases out there that incorporate math. For example: Here's a few from the National Center for Case Study Teaching in Science.  There's also a few Research Coordination Networks that incoporate  big data and math.  Also lots of bioinformatics.  What I like about this and things like GIS analysis of health disparities and other SJ issues is that they really grab students interest.

Love to hear more about the content of your faculty projects!

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Great idea for increasing the use of IBL in math classrooms. Do your participants generally come by themselves or as a cohort from an institution? I ask because faculty are more likely to change and have the changes persist if there are others who are involved in the change. Also, if they come as a cohort does an administrator come with to participate in the workshop? Again, change is likely to be sustained if there is "by-in" from the institution.

Thanks for sharing!!

Judy

Thank you for sharing your professional development program and assessment approach, Stan and Sandra! I have been working with the distributed professional development community for genomics/biology education (GEP) and I am excited to see the parallels to your community! We also see the importance of mentoring new faculty, especially in the distributed community where faculty members trying something new, may not have local support on their campus. We also put a lot of effort into engagement and discussion (rather than information "pushing" through communication channels). 

I am fascinated by the assessment model - I have not thought of capacity and intensity as a way to measure the impact of PD. Sandra, I am looking forward to tracking down the references you mentioned! 

One of the issues we are trying to solve for the longevity of our PD community is sustainability in the long term.  Have you been able to support the on-ramp workshops via grants for all these years? Do you charge participants (or their institutions) fees to maintain centralized support? Have you found other mechanisms of supporting your work?

Great video, Stan! I am also curious about Judith's question above. I ask because I'm curious if you are looking at change at the department level as well as the individual level. In our project we are also using the Theory of Planned Behavior to understand change at the individual level, but then also examining change at the department level through the lens of the 4 Frames. It seems like we should talk sometime; I would love to talk more about how you are examining instructional change!

Thanks for sharing this information about your project. As a strong proponent of inquiry instruction, it is great to know about other efforts at transforming the way that math and science are taught (and learned)! I would be interested in learning about the ways in which IBL and POGIL (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning, www.POGIL.org ) are similar and different - and of any possible synergies between our organizations. For example, the four pillars of IBL have many similarities to the foundational principles of POGIL! 

Rick

Thanks for the information about your project!  Having taught using IBL (POGIL specifically) for over 15 years, and run various PD workshops on this topic, I can attest to the importance of a strong community to share ideas. Often new implementers are the only ones in their department to be using IBL, resulting in pushback from students (why are you not lecturing). Having a community to support your efforts is super helpful. I think it would be great to connect the two communities in some way. At workshops we are often asked if we know anyone teaching using IBL in XXX area. Connecting the two projects in some way would grow the community of inquiry from both perspectives.

Another thing we have done in the ELIPSS project at our workshops, is to complete a rubric (teamwork or interpersonal communication) while workshop participants are actively engaged in an activity. We hand back the completed rubrics, like we would do with our students, which had lead to very rich discussions on active learning.

I just love big tent approaches....there are many ways to do cases and projects and one has to find what works for the students, the instructor and the setting.  One size does not fit all