Happy New Year: JMM, reflections on teaching with IBL, NE-IBLM Community, ...

Posted on: 
Monday, January 6, 2020 - 1:50pm

Dear Colleagues, Friends, & Supporters,

We hope you had a great fall semester and winter break! We are looking forward to going to the Joint Meetings in Denver soon. Please come visit us at the MLI booth, the NSF poster session, or come find us at one of the many other IBL related events.

There are three new blog posts that all connect to the idea of how future or in-service teachers can learn how to teach with inquiry. We describe three different models: a lab class in which future teacher work with high school students every week, a teaching assistant experience in an inquiry-based pre-calculus class, and a graduate class with an in-service teacher who implemented routines for reasoning in an intervention classroom.

We are also actively involved in the New England Inquiry-Based Learning in Mathematics Community (notice the new web site!). Our next events are on March 28th. If you live in or close to New England, make sure to join the email list to stay updated on events and professional learning communities!

If you want to spend time this summer to learn more about IBL and plan your own class in detail, consider the week-long workshops organized by AIBL.

We hope to see you at JMM,

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.

In this blog post Professor von Renesse and her students describe their teaching lab class. If we believe that learning happens best in an inquiry-based way then this applies not only to learning mathematics, but also to learning how to teach mathematics. The idea of this lab class is to create a learning environment in which college students can experiment with teaching in a high school setting and learn for themselves what works best and why.
 
 

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.