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The conference will actively involve and engage all participants throughout the following sessions:
10:00-10:20 Welcome Activity
10:30-12:00 Live Classrooms: The facilitator teaches a class while the participants are the students. The activity is created in a way that the participants can be their true mathematician selves and do not need to role play being students. This will be an authentic teaching/learning experience that allows us to reflect together on different teaching and learning styles. You can find the bios of all live classroom facilitators below. See the about page for the bios of our live classroom facilitators.
A. Inquiry-Based Pre-Calculus in Large Classes
Facilitator: Natalie Naehrig, University of Washington
This active class presents one way of letting students do much of the mathematical thinking and keeping them active and engaged. I chose a Precalculus class to demonstrate how some of the activities work. 'Students' - that is you - will enter this session with the knowledge of what a function, its domain/codomain, and its graph is. You will then form groups to inquire about how changes in the functional term result in changes of their graphs and vice versa.
B. Inquiry and Simulations Based Statistics
Facilitator: Laura Callis, Curry College
Simulation based statistical inference (SBI) engages students in creating the chance models themselves with tactile representations and technology to determine whether data from real-life studies are statistically significant. At my own institution, students learned more using SBI above the impact of active learning techniques like flipped classroom or lecture and practice. We saw these gains even among students with learning disabilities and with weaker math backgrounds. In this session, you will experience lessons from a published SBI curriculum (Tintle et al., 2021) as learners and reflect on the benefits and challenges for students and instructors.
C. Finding patterns in visual problems: Examples from Graph Theory
Facilitator- Moshe Cohen, State University of New York at New Paltz
A graph is a collection of points along with line segments connecting points. Think "connect the dots" or family trees or astronomical constellations. Graph theory subject is celebrated for its accessibility: after some definitions, problem solving comes naturally, and solutions can arise from several different arguments. Such problems may be featured in a Discrete Mathematics or Intro to Proof class but may also be used to inspire younger students outside of the usual curriculum. We will attack some problems together in groups.
12:00 -12:55 Bring your own Lunch & Round Tables: Themes of “Change on Different Levels”
Since 2018, the NE-COMMIT has been a strong community dedicated to broadening the use of inquiry in mathematics teaching. It is time to take stock, celebrate and reflect on the work that has been done, and think about changes we would like to make. Join us in an informal reflection on our journey and engage in a conversation about change at different levels.
a. Next steps for NE-COMMIT as a network
b. Next steps for individuals - Goal setting: One step to carry forward
c. Next steps for departments or colleagues - Goal setting: One step to carry forward
d. Reflect on ideas from summer and how they’re working out this semester
1:00-1:50 Parallel active sessions - Part 1 (see abstracts below)
How to teach algebra using learning objectives, self-assessment, and reflections. Marian Anton and Karen Santoro
Introducing Compassionate Math, Geillan Aly
A discussion about Ungrading, Erin Rizzie and Ileana Vasu
2:00-2:50 Parallel active sessions - Part 2 (see abstracts below)
Measuring Uncertainty: An Abbreviated Live Classroom, Brendan Kelly and Jeff Gittleman
NE-COMMIT Resource Hub Workgroup, Viktoria Savatorova and Volker Ecke
Let’s Talk about… Toxic Environments in Academia, Geillan Aly and Christine von Renesse
3:00-4:00 Learning Stories and Closing: Several members of NE-COMMIT will share a brief vignette of a memorable personal experiences regarding themes as course planning & assessment, student buy-in, faculty buy-in, productive discourse, etc. They can include (surprisingly) successful teaching-with-inquiry moments, or messy / challenging moments. You can add your story spontaneously if you feel inspired to do so.
6:00-8:00 Dinner meetings in person in various locations
Contributed Active Sessions - Abstracts
Contributed Active Sessions - Abstracts
How to teach algebra using learning objectives, self-assessment, and reflections, by Marian Anton (Central CT State University and IMAR) and Karen Santoro (Central CT State University)
In this session we invite interested instructors to experiment with a format for teaching quantitative literacy using contextual algebra. It can be used to design lectures, activities, and exams that are accessible to students and meet rigorous academic standards.
Measuring Uncertainty: An Abbreviated Live Classroom, by Brendan Kelly (Harvard)
The mathematics classroom has the possibility to stir students' curiosity, cultivate students' agency as independent learners, and empower students to step up to society's difficult questions. Keeping these goals in mind, we invite you to join us as we explore and work to refine an activity asking students to develop a method to measure uncertainty.
Introducing Compassionate Math, by Geillan Aly (University of Hartford)
Compassionate Math is a new company recently formed by a member of this community to address a significant need in supporting math learning, namely that learning math is both emotional and intellectual. The goal for Compassionate Math is to work with teachers, parents, and students and help each group work through the emotional challenges of learning and teaching math so they can be their best mathematical self. The idea is to bring the affective (emotional) side of learning math to the forefront, a side that is all too often forgotten. This includes thinking about issues of anxiety, and efficacy/identity but also about equity and social justice and how that contributes to limiting our mathematical achievements. In this talk, I will share the Compassionate Math Framework and go through newly designed reflective exercises to help you tap into your emotional struggles with learning or teaching math. The goal of this workshop is to introduce the company / services and solicit feedback from this community.
NE-COMMIT Resource Hub Workgroup: Create your page on the WIKI, make your work visible to others, share resources and collaborate! By Viktoria Savatorova (Central Connecticut State University) and Volker Ecke (Westfield State University)
We hope that the NE-Commit Resource Hub will provide a means for instructors to showcase and share their teaching practices, learn from others, and collaborate. The Hub will offer a repository of lesson plans, worksheets, grading techniques and more. Users can also connect to a network of educators for faculty development, discussion, and mentorship. During this active session participants will ask questions, discuss the possible structure and content, create, and fill their own pages. If you are a member of NE-Commit, we invite you to access the page and request access. Only if we work together, can we make large strides in advancing our own teaching and thus better support our students. We hop you will make suggestions and ask questions about the page design, and we will answer them to the best of our knowledge.
A discussion about Ungrading, by Erin Rizzie (University of CT) and Ileana Vasu (Holyoke Community College)
Several members in our region are currently including ideas of ungrading in their classes -- to address many of the power dynamics and inequities that can come with traditional grading methods. If you are curious about other people's experiences with ungrading, if you want to share your own, or if you just want to ask lots of questions about ungrading, this session is for you.
Let’s Talk about… Toxic Environments in Academia, by Geillan Aly (University of Hartford) and Christine von Renesse (Westfield State University)
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought much to the surface that has been previously unseen in our society. Many challenging circumstances have hitherto been dismissed, minimized, or considered not worth addressing. In the past year, a number of individuals in our NE-COMMIT community can no longer ignore the environments in which we work, and the manner in which we feel we have been marginalized. Some have been isolated / self-isolated / marginalized from a toxic work environment even before the pandemic and recent events have exacerbated this. In this session, the organizers will share some experiences in the hope of naming / discussing that which is normally not named or discussed. We invite you to listen and/or support the community or share your stories in the hope that we, both individually and collectively, can foster an environment to provide an outlet and means of support (emotionally / professionally) for one another. The overall goal of the session is to bring to light these matters in the hope that the larger academic system can be moved to be a more supportive and nurturing work environment. Attendees should note that norms of confidentiality and support will be discussed and your presence in this session demonstrates your commitment to abide by the shared norms which will be established.
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