Initiation Workshops
The MIP conducted five Initiation Workshops with mathematics faculty from institutions across the state of Oklahoma:
- Academic Success Skills: May 20 – 24, 2019
- Functions and Modeling: June 24 – 28, 2019
- College Algebra and Precalculus: August 5 – 9, 2019
- Quantitative Reasoning: May 17 – 28, 2021
- Calculus 1: August 2 – 13, 2021
Faculty participating in these workshops produced prioritized lists of concepts and skills for each course, including their corequisite supports, with detailed learning trajectories and resources to be used in further development work.
The MIP adapts a proven method to foster faculty collaboration pioneered and refined by the American Institute of Mathematics. Along with national experts, each workshop included approximately 30 participants representing mathematics leadership from each of the Oklahoma public institutions of higher education. Each of the Initiation Workshops meet for five working days in the summer and were led by a team with background in curriculum development and mathematics education research in the associated content area. The AIM workshop method focused participants on sharing relevant background knowledge and identifying critical content, challenges, and research questions through preparatory readings and general presentations and panels during the first couple workshop days. Subgroups then tackled consensus high-priority areas arising from the initial discussions. Through refinement, each workshop ultimately identified the 4-8 core concepts to be developed into instructional modules by subsequent Collaborative Research and Development (CoRD) teams. The core concepts are intended to form a small number of powerful ideas that are relevant throughout large portions of the course (for example rate of change in calculus). The modules are intended to be conceptualized as including both research based activities for developing the concepts and instructional guidance for leveraging these concepts throughout the course to support student problem-solving and enhance coherence.
In the four Initiation Workshops focused on gateway courses, the emerging community’s interpretation of the MIP elements of inquiry were developed to identify promising ways for the 4-8 core concepts to serve as a coherent way to frame and support significant portions of the course. For each topic, workshop subgroups developed conceptual analyses and an outline of promising approaches for active learning modules and applications. The conceptual analyses detail the ways of understanding desired as an outcome for all students in the course, common entry points for students’ understanding (including relevant supporting concepts), a progression of challenges and solutions that students could engage to develop these understandings, common pitfalls in the learning process and ways to address them, a mapping of ways in which these ideas support thinking and learning throughout the entire course, and applications relevant to the academic degrees supported by the gateway course that could serve as strong context for the learning modules. This provides the CoRDs with a coherent means with which to frame and approach the design of instructional modules.