We will continue the Innovative Teaching Seminar in Spring 2025. The main objectives for this seminar is
To reflect on our own teaching,
To try one new instructional approach in our course, and
To evaluate the effectiveness of our instructional approaches.
We will meet on selective Thursdays (see schedule below) at 2:30 pm in MATH 431.
The Spring 2025 seminars will have an emphasis on what *we* implement in our classes. The Past presentations below and Resources from Fall 2024 is a good starting point to think about what you can do innovatively in your classroom. Even if no presentation is scheduled for a particular time, we can still meet and chat about the ins-and-outs of our daily teaching experience.
We will operate more like a learning/discussing seminar than a regular research seminar. Presenters will often assign "homework" for participants to complete before the seminars. Email reminders of the seminar meetings will be sent out a couple of days ahead of time.
Presenter: Daniel Johnstone
Title: Think-Pair-Share Show and Tell
Content: Adding "think-pair-share" exercises into otherwise standard lectures can vastly enhance student comprehension and retention of material. Even so, the question of when and how one ought to implement them in class can be rather overwhelming. What sort of questions should be asked? How many should you ask? How much lecture time should be devoted to them? I propose we have a "show and tell" session focusing on how we have introduced (or plan in future to introduce) active learning into our classroom with this technique.
Homework: I would like everyone to come with: (1) some examples of exercises they’ve done in class which have gone very well and (2) some examples of exercises they’ve done in class which have NOT gone well (and perhaps how they’d like to change them for next time).
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Presenter: Shuyi Weng
Title: Jigsaw discussions in MA 266
Content: Jigsaw discussions consist of two rounds. In the first round, students are put into groups, with each group taking time to explore a different scenario. For the second round, the groups are mixed so that each new group has a representative for each of the scenarios explored in the first round. Students teach each other what they learned in Round 1, giving each student a role and a voice in the Round 2 group discussion. In this talk, I will share my experience with jigsaw discussions in MA 266. I will focus on my incentive, my choice of lecture topics for such discussions, and student feedback.
Presenter: Mahesh Sunkula
Title: Flipped Classroom for MA161 and MA162
Content: In this talk, I will discuss the structure of the flipped classroom that I implemented for MA161 in Fall 2024, highlighting what worked, what didn’t, and sharing some in-class activities I used to engage students. I will then talk about the changes I made for MA162 this semester (Spring 2025) and reflect on the challenges that need to be addressed to make the approach more effective.
Presenter: Phil Mummert
Location: BRNG B206 (beware of unusual location)
Title: Using Color in the Math Classroom
Content: Join us for an informal discussion of the different ways in which one can use color in teaching mathematics. One carefully described example in the literature involves the chain rule (Toney and Boul, 2022). I will share my own approach to color-coding and what students have said about it. Attendees are encouraged to bring examples to share.
Presenter: Brooke Max
Title: Engaging Students in Mathematical Problem Posing
Content: Mathematical problem-posing involves teachers or students generating new problems based on given mathematical parameters (Cai & Hwang, 2020). Mathematical problem-posing gives students a degree of autonomy such that they can explore ideas that interest them. In this session, we will utilize Cai’s conceptualization of problem-posing, discuss variations of mathematical problem-posing (Cai & Rott, 2023), and consider how it might be used in our teaching to inform our students and ourselves as instructors of their understanding. Additionally, participants will have an opportunity to share strategies they have explored in mathematical problem-posing.
Presenter: Alexandra Cuadra
Title: Using Writing To Learn Mathematics (WTLM) Activities
Content: One of my goals is to give students a larger voice in their thinking and understanding, and a larger ownership in the learning process by teaching mathematics literacy as part of the learning process. To empower students in mathematics learning, I integrate Writing to Learn Mathematics (WTLM) activities. These include "The Important Thing About..." prompt, inspired by Brown (1949), and "My Aspects of Mathematical Phenomena" (AMP) chart, building on Frayer et al. (1969) and Musingsofamathteacher (2011). Through these, students articulate their understanding of concepts like partial derivatives.
In this session, I would like for us as a group to talk about our thoughts about the idea and motivation behind WTLM activities as presented by Porter and Masingila (2001), and then try out the WTLM activities I have been using here at Purdue. Optional Reading: Additional WTLM activities can be found in Roepke and Gallagher (2015) paper.
Presenter: Kaitlyn Hood
Title: Clickers in the Large Classroom: Current Research and Best-Practice Tips
Content: This paper is an overview of the use of clickers in large lecture classrooms, which is a quick and scalable way to include active learning in a large class. The paper also covers other ways clickers can be used in the classroom and suggests some best practices for use. Since Purdue has a campus license for iClicker Cloud, making this clicker technology free to students and instructors, I thought this would be a nice paper to cover. We will try a small scale demo in the seminar.
Presenter: Shuyi Weng
Title: Blogging in mathematics courses: what people have done, and how you can do it
Content: I don't have a paper to present, because literature in this area is almost non-existent. Instead, I would like to share what people (me included) have done to integrate a blogging component into mathematics courses at various levels, the reasons for blogging, and how you can do it in your own courses. I will also share some personal observations of how blogging may be used to enhance student understanding.
Presenter: Daniel Johnstone
Title: Second Chance Grading: An Equitable, Meaningful, and Easy-to-Implement Grading System that Synergizes the Research on Testing for Learning, Mastery Grading, and Growth Mindsets
Content: This paper will make for a good start to things; it fundamentally discusses growth mindset and the notion of mastery grading which will put these ideas into the ether but also talks about how to actually implement a very straightforward mastery based grading system in practice. I’ll also embellish this with some of my own observations about seeing systems like this used in practice, both the benefits and the pitfalls.
The seminar is organized by Shuyi Weng in 2024-2025. If you would like to join the seminar, please fill out a participation survey to be included in the email list. If you have questions or comments, please contact weng83@purdue.edu.