Author: Carmel

PBL attitudes in retrospect

I had an interesting conversation with some students in my senior elective the other day. These students had taken our PBL algebraic geometry course two years ago as sophomores, and now are in a seminar-based senior elective, and of course, close to graduation. As our department is transitioning our Trigonometry materials into our third-year math course this spring, it is becoming apparent to our school community that this PBL curriculum has now infilitrated another course.

When the seniors in my current class found out that the new course was going in this direction they had a surprising reaction. “No fair,” one girl commented. I was dumbfounded. She was expressing her anger that whe she took this course last year it did not have a PBL curriculum. “How come it wasn’t taught that way last year?” Still in shock, it took me a while to digest the fact that the students were reacting this way. At the time that these students were in our Algebraic Geometry course, I heard many complaints about how difficult it was to work with the PBL curriculum and how much they wished it was more”traditional”, however now in rerospect they seemed jealous that this new class got to use it.

This actually is not surprising. What I have found anecdotally from talking to alumnae from my school who have gone through some of the PBL curriculum, is that once they are out of the moment, they can look back and realize that it was one of the best learning experiences of their high school math time. They realize that the accountability that they were held to was part of what was good for them and the high expectations of accessing their own prior knowledge was empowering. These students validated this idea for me and confirmed what we doing was the right thing.

So far it seems to be going pretty well in our second course. We are finding lots of typos and rewriting will be necessary, of course, this summer. However, overall, it seems to be agreeing with the students who have gone through the experience last year. Hopefully, when they look back, in retrospect, they’ll be able to see the value in it as well.

Reality Check

On Friday, I spent the day at Harvard Graduate School of Education, at a conference where many graduate students were presenting on recent research that they have been doing – either for their dissertaion work or for courses they are taking, etc. I observed many students from other schools presenting their work which ranged from highly interesting to highly esoteric. I was excited to hear positive feedback from my research on dialogue in the PBL classroom. Many people felt that it was important work and well done. Very nice to feel validated in that way. I also heard great reseach being done on discipline in urban schools, learning differences in math education and other areas.

I’ve also had this website go public, so hopefully if you are reading this you have either received my invitation email, or have heard from a friend about my website. My hope is to really create an online community where those educators who have been in touch with me with interest in these areas can have a space for the types of discussions that we are all interested in. I think this might be a good start and hopefully it will take off soon.

Busily preparing

I am finishing up my spring break from teaching and I was very busy with a great deal of doctoral work during this time off. I worked on a lot of this website and edited some papers. Currently, I am preparing my presentation for a conference this coming Friday in Cambridge – it will be my first presentation of the research I did last fall on discourse in the PBL classroom. Those who read my proposal commented that they found it interesting, so I am hopeful that it will be well-received. I am looking forward to attending this conference simply to experience a research conference and prepare myself for perhaps a professional conference in the near future.

I had a wonderful conversation this week via Skype with a school in California that has implemented Phillips Exeter’s PBL curriculum this year. It was fun to discuss with their department some of the ups and downs of this year. Interestingly, many of the common obstacles that other schools have faced were what this school brought to the table in that conversation. Hopefully, they have found their stride and will continue their great work into the coming year.

I have got my forums up and running (well, my husband has) and hopefully we will begin some great conversations soon. I look forward to hearing from all of those who have been in contact with me about PBL in the past years and how they are all doing.

Winter into spring

Hello reader – hopefully you have found this site easily. I am writing here at the beginning of March, as I sit down to fulfill about 6 goals written down on purple post-its stuck to my computer. I have many issues that I would like to address here in my first blog entry, but not knowing the issues that are on the readers minds is of concern to me. I would love to hear from people that I haven’t heard from in a long time – those from my summer courses, or those I have seen in workshops, etc. If you have thoughts, please let me know.

I will be creating forums based on topics that people inquire about or have interest in. My goal is to have this site become a resource for teachers who are interested in PBL or transitioning their school to PBL curriculum.

So for now, I am looking forward to seeing how my school will do this spring with the advent of our new Algebra II/Trig PBL curriculum. This will be the first semester that we utilize the trigonometry portion that we wrote last summer and it will be interesting to see how it goes. The students with which we will be using this curriculum did go through our geometry curriculum, so they do know what they are getting into. I wonder how they will react.

Hopefully, with spring will come new life, goals fulfilled (including my paper getting out to a journal), and new challenges faced as well. If you have a new challenge that you are facing in the utilization of PBL curriculum or movement towards it, please let me know!

~resources for mathematics education~

Welcome to my website that should serve as a resource for all those interested in Problem-Based Learning and related information about Mathematics Education.

During my time teaching, sharing in professional development and studying, I have found that the majority of mathematics educators are looking for different ways to meet their goals for students other than the traditional pedagogical approaches that typically are encountered in the mathematics classroom. Although educators realize the need for change in instructional approaches, they may not always have the opportunity, insight or ability to create that change on their own. I have enjoyed sharing my experiences and advice with my fellow educators through professional development workshops, casual communications, my previous blog writing, and other means of spreading the word of progressive mathematics education.

My hope is for this website to be my conduit for my work to the virtual educational community in order to facilitate communication of information and ideas. Please feel free to look around, read, think and hopefully it will foster some ideas that will inspire you.