Rose Asera, Ph.D Rethinking Pre-college Math Summer Institute Aug 22, 2012

Move into a situation with questions: starting with questions will take you places that starting with answers won’t. Formal inquiry: an organized form of professional development that involves forming questions, gathering and analyzing data, and acting on and sharing results Informal inquiry: nurturing your intellectual curiosity and asking questions. Inquiry becomes a habit of mind.

 Your college ?  Your department ?  Your classroom ? What do you pay attention to in order to describe these cultures ?

 Culture is the connective tissue between formal changes (policy, structure, content) and individual experiences  Can someone ‘change’ culture? (Can someone ‘culture’ change?)  What are the levers of culture change?  How are the characteristics of the culture a resource to you? an obstacle to you?  What is the relationship of culture change to changing policy/ structure/ individuals?  What are the characteristics of a culture of inquiry?

 What have you done that has shifted the culture in your department?  How is the departmental culture communicated to new people or part-time faculty? to students?  What do you do to establish the culture in your classroom?  Has changing instruction changed the way you see students and learning?

 What works /for whom /under what conditions ?  What do you know about your students’ lives, aspirations, & challenges? What strengths do students bring to the classroom?  How does knowing your students affect your teaching?  What does learning look like?  How do students view mathematics?  What is the relationship between the data patterns and your observations in the classroom?

Besides colleagues in your department, whose work is affected by changes you are making in developmental math?  Who are your allies? Do you have connections across campus boundaries and silos? Why is this important?  Who needs to be involved in the changes? Who needs to be aware and informed?

 Community & colleagues  Collaboration & conversation  Students as Co-inquirers

 WHAT ARE YOUR NEXT QUESTIONS?

 Taking your teaching sensibility--  Intuition  Hunches  Observations  Puzzles  Dilemmas  Questions Seriously and systematically pursuing evidence to gain more insight into student learning & Sharing it

Who are my students?  Katie Hern’s students at Chabot College

What are we teaching?  Jay Cho & Friends at Pasadena City College &id=

 How do we know they are learning?  Laura Graff and friends at College of the Desert &id=

The cycle of inquiry: An outcome of inquiry is more inquiry …. GATHER DATA ANALYZE DATA ACTION MAKE YOUR WORK PUBLIC SHAPE QUESTION

 What is?  What’s the problem?  What works? How?  What’s possible?  Why?

 Campus data– trends, patterns, big pictures  Classroom observations  Examples of student work  Results of a common assessment  Think-alouds  Student surveys, interviews and focus groups  Looking outward as well as inward: evidence from other educational settings (research literature, cases, etc)

 Finding patterns  Quantitative analysis- when are statistics useful?  Qualitative analysis – beyond anecdotes - what are the patterns of response?  Finding outliers: when are outliers worthy of attention?

 How does what you have learned affect the situation?  What actions do your data indicate?  Are there changes that can be made?  How is inquiry part of implementation? Of ongoing improvement?

 To reflect and reconstruct the process  To critically reexamine data  To tell the story  To make public and invite conversation  To share ongoing questions  For others to build on

 To gain different perspectives on the problem  In isolation (classroom/office/campus) you can’t see the dimensions or magnitude of the problem  You understand more about your context by seeing other contexts  The problems we are addressing are bigger than any one person “I never think it’s my problem alone”

Students  bring a new perspective to data gathering and analysis  have access to informal aspects of other students’ lives  can translate across cultures  may have tech savvy

 Increased local knowledge of teaching and learning & common language  Greater understanding of students and their learning process  Shared responsibility for student learning  Integration of professional learning in work responsibilities  Analysis to action  More inquiry  Inquiry becomes a habit or mindset

 It doesn’t all work  Finding things that don’t work is part of inquiry  Sharing mistakes is part of learning and is very valuable (and not always easy)

 Teacher as Researcher  Faculty Learning Communities  Reflective Inquiry  Scholarship of Teaching and Learning  Faculty Inquiry Groups  Formative Evaluation

SPECC work/undergraduate-education &id= Faculty Inquiry Network Contact: