We look forward to seeing you in Austin soon for the MAA PREP IBL workshop. Your first pre-workshop homework question is:
Do you know what those three acronyms stand for? Regardless of your answer to that question, we will enjoy having a lively week working together to help improve student learning in our courses. Here are some pre-workshop assignments and questions.
1. Please read the attached short .pdf file entitled, "Christmas at Big Lake" by Sam Young.
2. What do you expect your students to retain from your courses after 20 years?
3. What would you like your students to retain from your courses after 20 years?
On the first morning of the workshop, we will discuss your answers to questions 2 and 3.
4. Attached is a .pdf containing two chapters of the textbook "Number Theory Through Inquiry" by Marshall, Odell, and Starbird, which supports an Inquiry Based Learning approach to number theory. These chapters will give you some idea of the style of challenge questions that students would confront during an introduction-to-proof number theory course. Please put yourself in the shoes of a student. Choose some of the theorem statements in these chapters and envision what it would be like to work the proofs out on your own. If you know too much number theory to make these theorems appear challenging, then either forget a lot of number theory very quickly or pretend you are ignorant.
There are several books that include discussions of teaching issues concerning inquiry learning. You might find them interesting at some point, but we do not expect you to look at them before the workshop. One is the National Academies book "How People Learn", which is available online. Another is Derek Bok's book, "Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More."