I just spent the last few days in Austin, Texas, discovering a community of math educators at the 15th conference on the legacy of R.L.Moore. What is this conference about? What did I like about it? What did it make me think about? And what new question did this open?
What is this all about?
The Moore method (initiated by Robert Lee Moore in 1911 while he was at the University of Pennsylvania) is a teaching design: take a small class of 15 to 20 students, give them a list of problems and a glossary of the relevant and necessary definitions they will encounter while solving the problems. Then, ask them to work on the problems at home and come back to class prepared to share what they have. Class time is then spent having students present their solutions and having their peers critique it. The role of the teacher is to facilitate the whole process, never to give an answer or explain a solution.
This method is today understood as part of a larger teaching model called IBL (for Inquiry Based Learning) which promotes having students making sense of concepts themselves in a structured communal environment facilitated by the instructor.
What did I like about it?
This conference is mostly the meeting of a community of practice. Teachers practicing some form of IBL from all over the US (and a few Canadians) gather and exchange stories, tips, ideas, difficulties, successes and failures. Senior practitioners offer to mentor instructors at the beginning of their journey mastering this type of teaching; education researchers report back on the scholarly evidence they have accumulated; but mostly, people are here to meet and share their passion. When in your own institution, you sometime feel alone and estranged, attending such a conference is invigorating!
What influence did the conference have on my current work?
David Steinberg and I are working on a one-term course on professional development for TAs in our department. Among other thing, our goal is to design a course which allows our participants to become autonomous in their development as teachers. The IBL model offers an effective framework to develop such an inquiry and highlights specific items to consider. In particular, I am now more attentive to how we will structure our learning environment and scaffold the proposed activities. I will definitively post more about the development of this course later in the summer.
What new question opened up?
The greatest challenge of the IBL model is to apply it to capstone, service courses with large enrollment (or more pragmatically: calculus). There is no clear consensus on how to do this. A sub model called POGIL (process oriented guided inquiry learning) originally developed in chemistry seems very promising. I’ll explore and will report back later on.
Overall, I’m extremely satisfied by what I got from attending this conference and warmly recommend it. And on top of all the above, I also got to discover Texas and read “How learning works: 7 research-based principles for smart teaching” published by educators at Carnegie Mellon. Expect a post about this shortly.