Category Archives: Teaching

Standards-Based Grading in Fall 2018

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An Overview of My Semester

This semester, I’ll be teaching three different courses:

  • Pre-Calculus Mathematics (MATH 111), a course designed to review algebra and trigonometry for students who plan to take our (scientific) calculus sequence;
  • College Algebra (MATH 101), a course designed to cover algebra and function basics for students who will continue on either to MATH 111 (pre-calculus with trigonometry) or MATH 105 (business calculus); and
  • “Applications of Mathematics Across the Curriculum with Technology” (SMFT 516), a graduate-level course designed for in-service science & math teachers who are working toward an interdisciplinary M.Ed.

Due to enrollment challenges, my schedule for courses shifted in late July, so I spent a while during the summer trying to ditch my old plans for the semester and start over. Although I was planning to attend Mathfest in Denver, CO and give a talk in the session on #MasteryGrading based on my years of experience implementing standards-based grading in my courses, I must admit that before my trip I had no plans to use SBG in any of my courses this semester.

But then… UGH!!! INSPIRATION FROM PEOPLE. AND TOO MANY GOOD IDEAS.

So I attended every talk in the #MasteryGrading session at Mathfest. And wow, I got a ton of great ideas from all of the talks [stay tuned for future blog post] and, on a personal level, I really enjoyed our conversations, meals, and hang-outs outside of the session itself. (Thanks, y’all!)

Unfortunately a couple of days into Mathfest I realized I just couldn’t go back to traditional grading, so I threw out all my traditional plans for the semester and committed to myself that I would implement SBG/SBSG/MasteryGrading in 100% of my courses this semester.

Did I mention that I got home from Mathfest only 15 days in advance of my semester start?

The Nuts and Bolts of Fall 2018: SBG PreCalculus and SBG College Algebra

Rachel Weir, of Allegheny College, is maintaining a repository of course documents for secondary Mathematics courses that are using Standards-based grading, Specifications-based grading, or Mastery-Based Grading: Rachel’s SBG Repository

Both my Pre-Calculus and College Algebra courses are using the exact same setup. It’s very similar to Tom Mahoney ‘s (@MathProfTom) approach in his College Algebra courses. Here is the basic setup:

  1. I have written 25 standards for each course.
  2. Every time a student completes a problem on a standard, I will assess the solution using a “SGN Rubric” (see below). This assigns either 0 points, 1 point, or 2 points to each attempt.
  3. A student’s score on a standard is the average of their best two attempts.
  4. A student earns total points out of 50 possible (25 standards*2 points max). Together with work in an online homework system, this converts to a usual letter grade*.

For example, for any given standard, I will track a student’s progress as something like “0,1,2,1,1,1,0,2” and this student will earn a 2. After two perfectly correct solutions, the student isn’t required to answer problems on that topic again.

*My department requires a departmental-wide final exam that is graded using a partial credit, percentage system, and this exam must be worth at least 25% of each student’s course grade. So the actual grade computation is (75% performance on standards)+(25% final exam performance).

Links to Possibly Useful Things

Here are some links that I’ve freely distributed to my students. Perhaps reading them will shine some light on how I explained this system to them. Also, there are more details about the “SGN Rubric” I mentioned above and explanation about online homework & how it fits in.

Things To Do Later

I haven’t mentioned that third class (“Applications of Mathematics Across the Curriculum with Technology”). It runs double speed for half the time, during our Express II semester, and it doesn’t start until October. I want this course to be a project-based course, so I’m going to figure out some way to introduce specifications grading into my design. Robert Talbert (@RobertTalbert) has written extensively about his use of specs-grading and it’s my plan to steal as many ideas from his MTH 350 F18 Syllabus as I can. Our courses are very different, but he has so many clever ideas for his course skeleton. Once I write my syllabus, I’ll tell you about it.

Modeling Fun with Paper Fish

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Kate Owens, 02/2016

Kate Owens, 02/2016

Back in early February, as part of my ongoing work with the Math & Science Partnership, I led a Saturday professional development workshop for STEM teachers on “Proportion, Decimals, and Percents (oh my!).” There were two major projects we worked on that day. First, I split the teachers into teams of two or three and they read over some “Always, Sometimes, Never” statements. Fawn Nguyen’s blog post has some great ideas to get you started on those. Second, we simulated determining a wildlife population. Since this is something I hadn’t seen blogged about before, I thought I’d tell you about how it worked.

I found the idea for this in a book called “Mathematical Modeling for the Secondary School Curriculum.” It’s based on an article called “Estimating the Size of Wildlife Populations” that appeared in the NCTM’s Mathematics Teacher back in 1981*. Here’s how it works. Suppose you have some closed ecosystem that has a population of animals — maybe a large lake containing a population of a certain species of fish. What if we want to know how many fish are in our lake? Can you think of ways we might approximate the number of fish?

Here are some ideas that might spring to mind:

  • If we knew something about the social personality of the fish — for instance, maybe they are really independent and territorial and don’t like hanging out together — then we might know that they prefer to have at least X cubic meters of space to themselves. If we knew how big the lake was, then this could give us a rough count on how many fish there are. Problem: Knowing how big a lake is, in terms of volume, can be tricky. The bottom of the lake might not be flat. The amount of water varies based on temperature and rainfall. And what if we don’t know if our fish are social swimmers or solo swimmers?
  • We could rope off (fence off? net off?) a portion of the lake and count how many fish are in our section. If we knew we’d roped off exactly 10% of the lake, maybe we could use this information to estimate the total number of fish. Unfortunately, this is also difficult. First, we don’t know the fish are uniformly distributed around the lake. Maybe we roped off a portion of the lake that’s very rich in food source so we have many more fish than we should. Second, it’s tough to know if we’ve gotten exactly 10% of the lake or not. (How do you measure the volume of a lake, anyway? I’m sure there’s some way to do this, but I have no idea how.)

You may have thought of some other ways, too. Leave them in the comments. Here’s the way proposed in the NCTM article. It’s known as a capture-recapture estimate. Let F represent the number of fish in our lake. First, we capture a large number N of fish and tag them in a way that isn’t harmful; then we toss them back. We wait a while. Once the fish have had a chance to do their fishy things, we go back to the lake. We then capture x fish — some are tagged(T for Tagged), some are not. Assuming the fish are randomly dispersed throughout the lake, we might conclude that the number tagged in our sample is proportional to the number of tagged in the entire lake: N/F = T/x.

For a quick example, suppose we capture and tag 1200 fish. When we return to the lake, we re-capture 200 fish and we find that 30 of them are tagged. Assuming that the number tagged (30) in our sample (200) is roughly proportional to the number tagged in the lake (1200), we conclude that 30/200=1200/F so F=8,000.

What could go wrong? Well, maybe our sample isn’t very indicative of the population. We throw back all of the fish and then take another sample of roughly the same size. If we take several different samples, we can use the additional information from further samples to get a better estimate of the fish population. (I’m not going to go into all of the statistics at work here.)

Modeling the Fish Population

I gave each group of teachers a box. A shoe box would work. Inside each box were about 200 squares of paper. I didn’t count the squares as I put them in, and I didn’t want any two boxes to have precisely the same number. Having ~200 isn’t necessary — you just want enough people can’t do a fast eyeball estimate, but not too many because eventually you’ll want to count them.

One teacher “went fishing” and “tagged” a handful of fish (a dozen or so) PDP-fishby marking those squares with a signature, symbol, smiley face, whatever. The fish were returned to the lake before they suffocated. The box was shaken up. Another teacher then took a sample of size larger than the tagged number — something along the lines of 20-25 fish, give or take. The number of tagged fish in each sample was counted. Fish were returned to the pond, the box was shaken, and like it says on your shampoo bottle, “Lather, rinse, repeat.” Assuming the captured sample was the same size, after taking 10 samples, we averaged the number of tagged fish. Using proportions, we found an estimate for the total number of fish in the pond. Lastly, each team counted the actual number of fish in their pond to see how close they were. Most groups were pretty close. As an extension, we discussed how we might modify the method if more than one species of fish were in the pond.

(I saved the boxes. If I do this experiment again, I need to remember to make sure there are lots of squares of paper. Students were easily “fishing” for 30+ fish at a time, and so sometimes they’d end up capturing all their tagged fish.)

The teachers enjoyed this activity & I hope they’ll try something similar with their own students. We had a lot of great conversations about ecology and how our method could be extended, what flaws it might have, and so on!

*Knill, George. “Estimating the Size of Wildlife Populations.” Mathematics Teacher 74 (October 1981): 548′ 571.

Fun with Paper Folding

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Over the last several years, I’ve been able to work with teachers from local pythag-foldedschool districts as part of a grant-funded project called “The Math and Science Partnership Program” (MSP). Phase II of this program focuses on “Improving Math & Science Teaching through School Outreach.” We offer free professional development workshops for teachers, held on Saturdays, several times a year. Teachers who are part of our MSP Partner Schools can earn a $150 stipend from attending each workshop. All workshops are accepted for re-certification credit in the Berkeley & Charleston County School districts. Descriptions of our workshops dating back to 2014 are available online.

christel-and-kate

Christel and Kate

Last weekend, together with my co-Leader Christel Wohlafka, I held a Workshop called “Mathematical Fun with Paper Folding.” I was inspired to create this workshop as a direct result of Patrick Honner‘s “Scalene Triangle One-Cut Challenge,” which I think I learned about because of a mention of it by Evelyn Lamb. The “scalene triangle” puzzle stuck with me for several hours one day and I was almost unable to function in any capacity until I figured it out.

christel-wohlafka

Christel Wohlafka College of Charleston Department of Mathematics

Our agenda for our “Paper Folding Workshop” is available online. Many of our activities were inspired by great things I’ve learned about on Twitter, and many are available online at their original sources:

  1. The “Scalene Triangle” puzzle is part of @MrHonner’s blog series, “Fun with Folding”: http://mrhonner.com/fun-with-folding. The “One Cut Challenge” activities came from his “Fun with One Cut!” Workshop that he gave at the 2013 TIME conference. He blogged about it here: http://mrhonner.com/archives/11863 His templates are available online as a PDF file here: http://mrhonner.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/TIME-2000-2013-Templates.pdfgroup-one-cut-challenges
  2. “Hole punch symmetry” was produced by Joel Hamkins (@JDHamkins). He wrote about it in a recent blog post: http://jdh.hamkins.org/math-for-nine-year-olds-fold-punch-cut/ The template itself is available online: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bw3BMDqKsMmXRXlXU2xqbXlFYms/view Joel has a whole set of blog posts devoted to “Math for Kids” — http://jdh.hamkins.org/category/math-for-kids/
  3. The “Fold & Cut Theorem – Numberphile” YouTube Video we watched is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZREp1mAPKTM The female mathematician featured in the video is Katie Steckles, who finished her Math Ph.D. in 2011 at the University of Manchester. Katie’s webpage: http://www.katiesteckles.co.uk/ or you can find her on Twitter: @stecks
  4. Christel’s handout on “Dividing a Square into Thirds” came from an activity on Illustrative Mathematics
  5. Christel’s handout on “Paper Folding Proof of the Pythagorean Theorem” came from this “Teachers of India” resource.pythag1

 

frank

Frank Monterisi Jr. folds paper.

I had a lot of fun at this Workshop and I hope we will offer it again next academic year. Between now and then, I need to order more and better-quality hole-punchers. With some of Joel’s “One Punch” activities, the paper ends up folded over itself five or six times, and some of the “well-loved” hole punchers we had with us weren’t up to the task.


#TLTCon and Digital Collaboration

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On Wednesday, March 9th I’ll be leading a Workshop called “Introducing Students to Collaboration Using Google Docs” as part of the “Teaching, Learning, and Technology Conference“. It will be available to on-site participants at #TLTCon and also over Google Hangouts. If you’re interested in joining us, please contact me at let me know.

An Adventure in Standards Based Algebra

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This semester I am teaching several sections of “Math 101: College Algebra”. One section uses an “emporium” method, where students work independently in a computer lab. Instructors are available for questions and we also hold mini-lessons as needed, during which small groups of students can work on a particular topic at the same time. The other two sections are “traditional” in format and I’ve designed a standards-based grading system for them.

I began by creating a list of 30 standards for our 16-week semester. These are grouped by textbook section. Each standard has one or more “I can…” statements associated with it. Here’s the complete list. I’m giving three midterm tests this semester and each test will have an assortment of problems. The exam I gave this week covered our first six standards and had fourteen problems. Not all standards had the same number of problems.

I graded each problem using a modified “ERMF Rubric” (see http://www.nctm.org/Publications/mathematics-teacher/2004/Vol97/Issue1/EMRF_-Everyday-Rubric-Grading/). If you aren’t familiar with ERMF, I’d suggest checking out this post by Taylor Belcher, or some examples of the ERMF Rubric used in a beginning physics course. I decided I didn’t like the baggage associated with an “F” so I made mine an “ERMN” rubric:

ermn

Basically, I’m implementing a “Pass/Fail” system — although I refer to those as “Proficient” and “Not Proficient.” Scores of “E” and “M” are passing scores, and scores of “R” and “N” are failing scores. If a student earns all “E”s and “M”s on problems from a particular standard, then they get a “Proficient”. If there’s a mixture of some “R”s or “N”s, I looked at those case-by-case to determine if the student had shown enough understanding of the relevant ideas to merit a “Proficient” or not.

Overall, grading the exams took about one minute per exam page. I have about 50 students and this exam contained 6 pages. I don’t think this is too far off what it would have taken, time-wise, to grade using a traditional points- or percentage-based system.

I’m allowing students to come to my office for re-assessments, so any standards that earned a score “Not Proficient” can be improved upon later. In an upcoming post, I’ll write about my “Policy for Re-Assessments” and outline my system. From past experience, one key factor I’ve found is limiting the number of standards that can be re-attempted to no more than one per week.

At the end of the semester, 50% of the course grades will come from how they perform on their midterm tests. I’m converting all these “Proficients” and “Not Proficients” into a numeric score using this formula: “Midterm Exam Grade = 25 + 75*(# Proficient)/(# Total)”. Basically, this is the percentage of standards ranked Proficient, plus a tiny bit. Now I have to run off to class to return exams to students and explain more about how this grading system works — and why I believe it is to their advantage.

 

Documents related to SBG

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This afternoon I’ll be presenting about standards based grading as part of Teaching, Learning and Technology‘s “Faculty Showcase.” I’ll be giving a similar talk at an upcoming conference. In case you’re interested, here are some documents related to my presentations:

A lot of my FAQ document was borrowed from Joshua Bowman (@Thalesdisciple). This semester, I didn’t actually give my students the FAQ document — It turned out that after three semesters of SBG, my explanation to students about how our grading system works & why I think it’s a good idea has gotten a lot better.

Actually, that point speaks to one of the great things I’ve gotten out of using SBG: Implementing my system forced me to give deep consideration to exactly what mathematical content I want my students to get out of the course. Instead of debating if homework should count 10% or 12% of the overall grade, or what I should do if a student misses a quiz for an undocumented reason, or other administrative policies like those, the SBG system made my entire course planning process focus on the math stuff I want to teach and assess — instead of worrying about policies unrelated to mathematics (compliance with the rules, attendance, percentage breakdowns, etc).

Two Upcoming Talks on Standards Based Grading

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In the next month or so, I’ll be giving two talks on my implementation of standards based grading. (Okay, if you want to be really precise, that should say that I’m giving the same talk twice.) The first will be hosted by our “Teaching, Learning, and Technology” (@TLTCofC) division as part of their events for “Assessment Week”, and it will be on Wednesday, April 1st at 2pm. The second will be at SOCAMATYC  — the South Carolina Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges Annual Conference. They haven’t finalized their schedule yet, but the conference runs Friday 4/17 through Saturday 4/18. Thanks go to Frank Monterisi (@frank314) for letting me know about this opportunity.

Here’s a blurb about my talk:

In this presentation, we will give an overview of standards based grading (SBG) including helpful answers to questions of the form “What?”, “Why?” and “How?”. While an implementation specific to Calculus II will be discussed, the method outlined could be applied to courses in any discipline. If you’ve ever wondered about alternatives to traditional grading and how to avoid hearing the question, “What percent do I need to make on the final exam to get an 82% in the class?” then this is a great place to start.

Once I have put together my slides, I’m hoping to upload them here, along with some updated SBG documentation from my Calculus II course, like my current list of standards and the information provided to students about how the grading system works.

In a way, it feels a little strange to prepare a talk about standards based grading when I feel like the relative newbie to this topic. My entire system came about after many conversations and interactions with fellow educators on Twitter, and I am still indebted to them for all of their helpful support and guidance. In particular, I couldn’t have gotten my course running smoothly without inspiration from Frank Noschese (@fnoschese) and Joshua Bowman (@thalesdisciple). A quick google search just told me that Joshua gave a similar talk about his transition to SBG; I stumbled on his slides here.

Reflection on Standards-Based Calculus

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Our semester is wrapping up and we only have one more class meeting day after Thanksgiving. I’ve been teaching two sections of “Calculus II” using my standards-based grading system that I’ve mentioned before. I think I made several improvements this semester and I wanted to share them, along with a couple of things I’m still contemplating. But first, here are things I thought went well:

  • I really liked having my standards organized by Big Questions. This is probably something I could have implemented outside of my grading system. Somehow writing and organizing my list of standards gave me the motivation and time and priority to think about the take-aways I wanted my students to get from our course.
  • Last Spring, I had approximately 18 standards, meaning about one per week. They were large learning targets. Take, for example, the “Techniques of Integration” standard that encompassed a couple of weeks of class time spent talking about integration by parts, by trigonometric identities, by trigonometric substitution, by partial fractions, and so on. This semester, I wanted more standards that were more specific. I hit my goal of 30 standards for the semester and this number worked well. On the one hand, the standards were specific enough that students could focus on just one idea at a time. On the other hand, there weren’t an unreasonable number for me to assess. Roughly they correlated to one standard per textbook section, spanning about 1.5 classes per idea.
  • Originally, I had a “policy of replacement” where a score would be updated each time a problem was attempted. In some cases, this seemed to harsh, since prior good work was “erased” easily. In some cases, this seemed to lenient, because sometimes an easy problem would earn a high score, but replace more thoughtful work on a harder problem. This semester scores were defined as the average of the scores from the last two attempts. This also made picking problems for re-assessments easier on me since I wasn’t as concerned about having them all be exactly the same difficulty. It also means that a score of 4 means a student demonstrated a strong level of mastery on two problems of a particular type, and that seems to work well.
  • I limited the number of re-assessments to one re-assessment topic per week. For example, if a student were struggling with Taylor Polynomials, they could come in throughout the week and try re-assessments. In some cases, they would just solve one problem. In other cases, they might solve four or five problems, each time getting a little more of the correct solution. Previously I let them do 2 standards per week but I found two problems with this: First, some students would just always pick their lowest two scores and try them, without really ever focusing on a single idea and working toward mastering it. Second, having multiple re-assessments on multiple topics times multiple students meant my grading workload was higher. So, one per weeks seems like a more manageable number for them to work on and it makes my grading workload lighter. Lastly, since we had 30 standards (but only 16 weeks) this policy pushed them to demonstrate mastery on in-class assignments (quizzes, exams) without just punting them to re-assess in my office later on.

Two things I don’t have data on yet:

  1. This semester I tried assigning online homework, with the homework contributing 5% to the overall course grade. I found assigning just textbook problems (and not grading them) did not work well. Perhaps I was not very good at motivating students to solve more problems on their own? I haven’t taken a detailed look at homework scores compared with course standing, so I am not sure if homework correlated with success on in-class assignments or not. I also feel a bit “icky” about assigning and grading homework, given some of the research I’ve seen.
  2. The other change I made was I separated “during semester scores” from “final exam scores.” So 70% of course grades will come from a letter grade assigned based on the scores on standards that were accumulated during the semester and 25% of course grades will come from a letter grade assigned based on scores on standards that will be accumulated on the final exam. This breakdown was in response to some conversations with students from last semester who felt that the old policy (“average of semester score and final exam score”) was too strict. We will see how this works out and if there is much movement in pre-final letter grades to post-final letter grades.

I’m teaching calculus II again in Spring 2015 and I plan to continue using this system. I am still entirely undecided about trying it in Pre-Calculus. I have several worries about trying it in that course.

Postscript: Here are some links to some older blog posts about my SBG Calculus adventure:

https://blogs.charleston.edu/owensks/2014/10/09/big-questions/

https://blogs.charleston.edu/owensks/2014/08/18/list-reboot/

https://blogs.charleston.edu/owensks/2014/02/25/on-the-purpose-of-examinations/

https://blogs.charleston.edu/owensks/2014/01/09/sbg-faq/

My Feedback Experiment

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I’m trying something new in my exam grading process. I’ve been wondering for a while what sorts of comments to write on student solutions(1). My goals:

  • Convey to student what level of mastery their solution has demonstrated about the assorted topics
  • Convey to the student where any mistakes or errors were made
  • Avoid spending hours upon hours grading exams and/or leaving lengthy comments
  • Show positive & supportive sentiment

Recently, I’ve been writing questions instead of comments on exams. Some examples:

  • Rather than writing, “You forgot to use the quotient rule here” I’ll write instead, “How do we differentiate a quotient?”
  • Rather than correcting an antiderivative miscalculation, I’ll write instead, “Is the derivative of your answer equivalent to the integrand?”
  • Rather than fixing an arithmetical error, I’ll write instead, “Are you sure this should be 81?”
  • Rather than writing, “Your formula is wrong,” I’ll write instead, “What happens if we plug in x=4 on both sides?”

What I Wonder: I don’t know if what I’m trying is a good idea, a bad idea, or just totally crazy. When grading exams, I wonder (1) how to communicate mathematical corrections to a student and (2) how to be supportive of the emotions surrounding test-taking. I had a number of conversations this week with mathematicians about times they had really miserable experiences with feedback they got from their own math professors “back in the day.”

[It’s also interesting to me that we all seem to have stories of the form “The time my math professor made me cry was…”]

I really do not want to make any of my students cry about a calculus exam. I really do want to say helpful, supportive, thought-creating comments that help them move forward mathematically. I am trying to figure out how to balance both of these things. How do I say, “Your solution is wrong, but I really believe in you & your ability to mastery this material! Keep trying!”

Footnote (1): I’m completely ignoring what I know about the feedback & learning cycle. In particular, I am taking huge latitude here and ignoring the fact I know the research says I should be doing more formative assessment and less summative assessment. I’m also ignoring that I’m probably not going to be successful at my current quest because research has shown that regardless of what comments we give students, if we give them a grade at the same time, they tend to ignore the comments anyway. In fact, I’m going to ignore this so loudly, I won’t even track down the links to the ed journal articles I’ve read about this very thing.

Postscript. I went and hunted down some links to stuff I know about feedback. It all started when I asked something on Twitter:

Some stuff I learned:

and also, http://blog.mathed.net/2011/08/rysk-butlers-effects-on-intrinsic.html has a summary of Butler’s Effects on Intrinsic Motivation and Performance (1986) and Task-Involving and Ego-Involving Properties of Evaluation (1987).

Escaping the Lectureculture

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For years now I’ve been a reader of Robert Talbert‘s column Casting Out Nines hosted by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Last week he wrote a post (“Is lecture really the thing that needs fixing?“) that gave me a lot to chew on. Here’s where I find myself today:

  1. Lectureculture is a set of machinery that self-replicates and it has political, social, psychological, instructional, and institutional components. It is pervasive and I find it in the world all around me, and some of the cultural natives don’t even recognize its existence.
  2. When I run a course, my #1 goal is to help learners move from being introduced to a concept to understanding and displaying mastery of the concept. Lecture is not the most effective way to help learners*.
  3. If I do nothing but lecture in my classes, I am helping sustain lectureculture and I am not helping my learners toward mastery the best I can, in violation of my #1 goal.

My plan of action: I’m teaching “Calculus II” again this semester. Although I’m using a standards-based approach, I must fess up that last semester nearly all of our class time was devoted to either lecture or assessment.

I am a lectureculture native and it is hard for me to let go. But I have come up with two ways I want to add non-lecture content delivery this semester (that don’t involve me tossing out all of my old materials).

First, I plan to continue last semester’s “Madness Mondays.” On those days, I introduced my students to ideas not necessarily tied to our course. I wanted to pick topics that I thought would inspire curiosity or happy befuddlement in my students, so they would walk away wanting to know more about what they had heard. (Examples: The Cantor set. Hilbert’s Hotel. Countably infinite vs uncountably infinite). I hoped to approach these ideas using a type of moderated discussion, letting the students ask questions to each other and talk about what was perplexing, interesting, fascinating, confusing, etc.

Second, I was really inspired by a recent video by Jo Boaler about “Number Talks” and I plan to try doing a weekly “Number Talk” (or something like it) with my calculus students.

My husband asked me why I wasn’t combining these things under one umbrella. To me, they hit two different–but equally important–goals for my course that can’t be found directly on our syllabus. They are

  1. I want my students to develop an appreciation for mathematics outside of what will show up on their next exam. I want them to be exposed to the kinds of questions mathematicians ask. I want them to practice the difficult skill of speaking with others about mathematical ideas.
  2. I want my students to become more fluent in numeration. I want my students to practice looking at the same problem from multiple perspectives. I want my students to see mathematics as a creative endeavor and get away from the idea that what mathematicians do is “apply a standard algorithm, proceed the same way, get the right answer.”

[Many of my digital colleagues seem to use some type of presentation requirement in their courses to get at item (1.) above. While I think that having students present math problems, solutions, ideas, etc. to each other would help develop this skill, and other skills too, I remember how terrified I was as an undergraduate at the thought of standing up in front of people and I don’t think I could impose those feelings on anyone in my classroom.]

Hopefully I will come up with other ways to push back against lectureculture in my classroom.

Footnote:
*As I was writing this post, the following MOOC announcement appeared in my Twitter feed & seemed quite apropos: