This post is a summary of some research findings for a series of workshops we have conducted with NSF PRODUCT. The evaluation team for the project is Dr. Sandra Laursen, Dr. Tim Archie, and Devan Daly, CU Boulder E&ER (Link to work on professional development, link to people). The talk was presented at the Joint Mathematics Meetings on January 7, 2021.
One of the many research questions they studied is, "How much is enough professional development?"
Some key points:
- We offered two general types of workshops.
- One week, residential or online via zoom summer intensive workshops (IWS). These were 30 hours+ of workshop time with a year of follow-up email mentoring.
- Shorter traveling workshops (TWS), where two facilitators would travel to a conference or department and offer a workshop that lasted from a few hours to a day or day and a half.
- IBL capacity is a measure of skills and practices related to IBL teaching. It's sort of like a battery pack for teaching. More capacity means more skills and knowledge.
- One result from the analysis is that both formats had a positive and significant impact on increasing IBL capacity.
- IWS participants implement a more intensive version of IBL compared to TWS participants.
- TWS reached a different subset of the teaching population and was effective at increasing interest in IBL.
- TWS reaching different subset of teaching population is due in part by outreach efforts to send facilitators to groups that are not doing IBL yet. For example, sending teams to 2-year colleges. The IBL community in math roots in the Mathematical Association of American, which skews toward 4-year and advanced degree granting institutions. Travel funding can be a barrier for IWS, and TWS commitment level is lower. (It's a commitment to spend a week of summer at an IBL Workshop.)
- Rather than the dosage analogy, a another analogy is TWS and IWS are different tools, and could be used strategically for different main purposes.
- Takeaway: Use TWS to increase awareness, interest, reach new instructors, and get people trying IBL methods. Use IWS to increase depth of IBL implementation.
