Follow-up disucssion:
The TMC13 session:
We started off reading the six cases in ProblemBasedCourseBackground.pdf.
We then filled out this grid: ProblemBasedCourseBlank.pdf. The idea was to look at how 6 teachers set up their courses and to decide what values those choices reflected from our point of view. To fill it out, read over the six cases and think about some decisions that all six teachers had to make. Those go in column 1. The specific choices each teacher made go in columns 2-7. Finally, choices you might make go in column 8.
I don't have participants' grids but here is how I filled it out. (We didn't discuss my choices during the session; these aren't the "right" way to do it, just A way to do it. I'm sharing it just 'cause I have it. It would be cool if other participants want to post pictures of their grids here too.)
I'm linking three different forms--
After about 30 minutes of working on the grids we had a discussion about which decisions people were most interested in and what value trade-offs accompanied those decisions. The resulting list was photographed by the ever-helpful @j_lanier: BQIY83zCEAMdUBN.jpg-large.
PS Several of the courses we looked at place a lot of importance on writing and use a rubric.
The rubric used by Likis and Goldner is here: paper + presentation rubrics_feedback.doc.
Likis has younger kids and offers them an organizer to help them write to the rubric, especially at the start of the year.
The organizer is here: write up GO v2.doc
At the end, we took a few minutes to debrief in small groups where we'd gotten to during the hour; what insights or questions we had, what we learned or realized etc. And in the last couple minutes, people composed 140-character summaries of where they got to during the hour. Optionally people tweeted those summaries to #PMCmap (problem-based-course map). Since twitter searches seem to expire after a while, here's a record of what had been tweeted as of 2 hours after the end of the session:
Justin Lanier @j_lanier1h
Decisions and values in a PBL course, as analyzed/brainstormed by our session. #TMC13 #PBCmap pic.twitter.com/AWZHPviZJk
View photo
22 July:
Food for thought: ProblemBasedCourseBackground.pdf
19 July:
It would be good to decide what we mean by a "problem-based course" before we arrive. Since
all math courses contain a lot of math problems, what makes a problem-based course problem-based?
If you have an off-the-top response to this question, don't wait: right now, click on over to the blog at
http://wp.me/pXvhL-je and pop your answer in a comment.
Otherwise you'll just have to live with my definition!
From the TMC13 Program:
Ok, so you want your students to spend a lot of time solving problems, and you have a
bunch of candidate problems. How do you organize this? Do all kids solve the same
problems? How much choice do they get? What are they doing in class? Out of class?
How much time do you spend puzzling vs. writing vs. presenting? Do you permit solving
in pairs or groups or not? How does assessment work? When and how do they get
feedback? How does grading work? How you do respond to kids that don't engage?
How do you make sure kids do enough to prepare for the next course? The premise of
this session is that there are many valid answers to each of the questions above, but
that different combinations of choices will lead to different behaviors in different
circumstances. If the answer is, "It depends on the kids", how exactly? Let's map the
feasible and infeasible regions of this choice space. Join the conversation, already in
progress, at http://wp.me/pXvhL-iM. Then join us at TMC to continue the conversation
and draw our map!
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