Next week we shall start the core weeks and we are all (I hope) excited to see what kind of activities the participants will come up with!

Today, I’d like to talk about one topic that came up during our class discussions. We were discussing the chapter of How Learning works on Student Development and Course Climate when the theme of stereotype showed up; indeed, mathematics is a field, with the other “hard” sciences and to some extend engineering, where stereotypes are pretty strong.

Even though this is nothing new this problem is still pretty hard to address; indeed, as illustrated in this recent study, faculty are sometimes unconsciously biased against certain category of students/people. Moreover students can also underperform due to what is called stereotype threat, the idea that they belong to a group that is not good at a given task. Here again, this can be an unconscious process and it is sometimes triggered in very subtle and by apparently insignificant actions.

During this discussion, two main views emerged: either talk about it in class in order to prevent such a threat to happen or be aware of it and act accordingly, namely, by being as impartial as possible but without directly talking about it with the students. The idea of talking about a possible stereotype threat is partially supported by this study, where students tended to perform the same when informed about the potential stereotype threat. One concern about this approach is that it could backfire and in the end have the opposite effect; this question remains open at the moment. Regarding the second view, acting as impartially as possible, this is of course desirable, and teachers should always do their best to act so.The difficulty here is that favoritism can be unconscious and thus pretty hard to control. As the first study mentioned above indicates, even people who think they are acting impartially can be biased. The question is then to know whether having measure specifically for that such as only having a number and no names on homework and midterms is useful and/or easy enough to set up. One could argue that just the handwriting give some information that could then lead to some unconscious favoritism. These last hypotheses remain to be tested.

As one would have guessed, there seems to be no miracle solution to stereotype threat. Hence, acting in good faith and being as impartial as possible seems to be the best one can do.

With the Prep weeks in full swing, the various components of the course are starting to fall into place.

We are currently nearing the end of our first book: How learning works. The in class discussions have been fruitful. The ideas generated, particularly regarding motivation and course climate, can be further explored during the Core weeks and concretely placed in the scrapbook.

In preparation for the core weeks, the various blogs and wiki have been set up. This will allow the participants (and the coaches) and share their thoughts, ideas and insights that they gain during the coming weeks. Within the rules and boundaries that the participants have set up (and also with their permission), I would like to give some highlights into the areas and activities that the participants have chosen the explore during the core weeks.

To assist the development of their core week activities, each group member will take on one of two roles: One person will be responsible for setting up the activity and the second person will be responsible to making sure the activities serve a purpose and to implement/facilitate feedback from the group.

The prep weeks conclude next Monday when we finalise the plans for setting up the scrapbook and from there the participants take full control of the course with the first round of in class and online activities. I am definitely looking forward to seeing what the participants have planned, what challenges they have set and what ideas I will be able to adopt into my own teaching.

Welcome to the blog of the Math Teaching Assistant Accreditation Program Course!

In this first post, we shall mainly describe what this “course” is about and how is will be ran this term. It has been a few years that the department of mathematics of UBC has an accreditation program for its TA’s. This term it will materialize as a course/seminar (we are actually not sure what the best terminology is, feel free to suggest one!). The main goals of this course is to give the opportunity to our participants to :

• study current educational/pedagogical texts and meaningfully interpret them in the context of teaching mathematics,
• practice and experiment the application of education theories to mathematics by creating and leading engaging learning activities, both in class and online,
• develop new tools and activities for the classroom.

In order to achieve this goal, this course is structured as follows :

• four weeks of preparation time during which the participants read the book How Learning Works, set up their own goals and framework, and are introduced to the different technologies to be used during the course,
• seven weeks representing the core activities of this course, with each week one in class and one online activity designed and lead by the participants. The in class activities will refer to material from How learning works whereas the online activities are linked to the book What Best College Teachers Do,
• one week or wrap up, feedback and public presentations of the work accomplished during the term.

We have four participants, divided in two teams of two and two facilitators. During the preparation weeks, the time is divided between presentation of online tools (such as wikis, blogs and so on) by the facilitators and general discussions about the chapters of How Learning Works. During the core weeks, each team is in charge of one activity per week (alternating online and in class).

Besides these activities, participants develop during the whole term both a teaching dossier and a scrapbook. For the teaching dossier, we follows the guidelines and structures proposed by the Canadian association of university teachers. The scrapbook is basically a list of ideas and concrete activities to be used in the classroom, the goal is to have engaging, interesting and research-supported activities and/or documents.

If you have any question about the course, feel free to contact of the the two facilitators (the author of this post and Tom Wong).