IBL Workshop Model and Real-World Results (Wonkish)

This post is about professional development, and is intended for those interested in faculty professional development.  There may be some applicability to K-12 PD, but I'm not promising that. Presented here is a model that I argue can be used outside of Mathematics in higher ed. My experience in K-12 PD tells me that changes can be made for K-12, but that there are other aspects (such as working with school districts, parents, testing, etc.) that add more layers that need to be carefully and thoughtfully handled (that may require much more resources).

This post is also from the perspective of people on the front lines. Our team works with teachers, and we are teachers.  Our work is grounded in the hard efforts of teachers who have thought carefully about the issues.

The evaluators for the project I've been working on are Dr. Sandra Laursen and Chuck Hayward, at Ethnography and Evaluation Research, CU Boulder.   We have run a set of IBL workshops (funded by NSF SPIGOT) in 2013-2015, and have some results to share.

The main results:

• Total number of participants is 138
• ~ 75% implementation rate
• 61% of the participants are in the first 5 years of their teaching careers.
• In just the first year after the workshop, participants taught 180+ classes to 4600+ students (in the real world)!
• Ongoing support via Email mentoring is a critical feature
• An inclusive or "Big Tent" definition of IBL is critical for allowing participants to find their own way, suitable for their situation.

The short version is that uptake is happening at a high rate!  This is an encouraging sign, as it provides evidence that effective PD can make a difference.

How we got to these results is a very, very large undertaking spread over about a decade of work by a team of people.  I'll briefly highlight the main facets in the rest of this post.  An embedded slideshow appears farther down this post with more details and diagrams.

First, we identified major obstacles that faculty face when learning to implement IBL methods.   If an instructor has not had much or any firsthand experience with IBL, it is hard to convey through discussions what an IBL class is like and how to pull it off. Additionally, there are skills, practices, curricula, and assessment to consider, all of which are different or changes.   Hence the need for a highly specialized professional development experience that directly addresses the challenges and needs new IBL instructors deal with.

Obstacles or challenges include lack of experience with IBL,  the need for instructors to learn IBL teaching skills, the Math Ed Knowledge Gap, IBL course materials, assessment in IBL courses, and organizing the structure (i.e. syllabus) of an IBL course. With a list of obstacles in hand, much effort went into designing workshop components to direct address and reduce the identified barriers.

It it emphasized that the workshop is designed as a single composition, where all the parts of the workshop are interconnected and the main goal is getting participants to a point where they can teach an IBL class successfully.  It is definitely NOT about trotting out our favorite activities.  Indeed, teaching is a system, and teaching is a cultural activity. Hence, the workshop is about providing a broad IBL framework that participants can adapt to their situation. The main focal points are (a) IBL teaching skills and practices, (b) understanding the evidence for IBL and how students learn, (c) linked teaching choices (assessment, problem posing, and content), and (d) building a practically feasible (to the participant) course.

Another important feature of our work is data driven decision making. The staff used evaluation data and research to inform decisions about all aspects of running and designing workshops, from recruitment, building workshops materials, adapting sessions to better meet participant needs, and also to main components that are successful.  It's through this iterative, self-assessment process that the workshop model has improved over time.  Sandra Laursen and Chuck Hayward head up the evaluation and research efforts for our projects, and their regular insights helps use make small and longer-term positive changes.

Our current NSF funded project, PRODUCT, has the main goal of expanding the profession's capacity to offer a version of the 4-Day IBL Workshop and developing short workshops that can be "sent" around the country and increase awareness of IBL.  The goal is to build the PD network up to a point where a much larger capacity PD exists and a larger variety of workshops (weeklong and short workshops).

More details are in the slides below.


OR click this link to Slides About the IBL Workshop Model

Edit: Click here to link to the evaluation report.

"Activation Energy" and IBL Uptake

Here's a basic question.  What does it take to switch from traditional to IBL teaching?   This question can be answered in many ways.  I'm going to come at this from an education system reform angle.  Essentially the general problem is the implementation challenge in education.   Perhaps the biggest challenge for the education community now is implementing what works in the classrooms on a broad scale, and open questions remain about what it takes in time and investments to make the necessary changes.   In this post the notion of activation energy is used to shed light on what it might take to make reform stick.

In Chemistry, activation energy is a term that means the minimum energy that must be input to a chemical system with potential reactants to cause a chemical reaction.  Implementing IBL is analogous in that there is a substantial initial investment by an instructor to learn the necessary skills and practices to be successful in the classroom.  What is the activation energy required for an instructor to switch to IBL teaching?

Instructors of course vary greatly, due to experiences and teaching environments.  For our purposes a "back of the envelope" computation is all that's necessary to illustrate the main points.  Let's take as an example an assistant professor who attends an IBL workshop.  In this case, we have an instructor who elects to attend a workshop, is motivated to learn to use IBL, is invested in her job and institution, and wants students to learn authentic mathematics.

So here it is.  The activation energy required is 100+ hours, plus resources to travel to a workshop,  prepare for a course, and engage with the IBL community.   The breakdown is as follows.

• 10 hours pre-workshop preparation
• 40 hours of workshop time
• 50+ weeks to prepare for a target course (begin course materials adaptation, plan activities for the first few weeks, syllabus, other course management.)
• Plus hundreds of hours more through the first few terms of using IBL.

The aggregate investment per faculty is roughly between $5,000-10,000 to attend a workshop, materials, mentoring, and so forth.   Most of this cost is imbedded in the professional development infrastructure.  Experts need to be hired to develop the materials and run the workshops.  My initial estimate of the the IBL activation energy is approximately 100hrs + $10K (or 100+10 for short).   This is the base investment to get started.  Becoming an expert IBLer is a much, much longer effort that takes years.

It's noted that this investment level can go down with economies of scale, but we are nowhere near that level of uptake or infrastructure today. The infrastructure across the nation is not yet established to offer lower-cost options.  In fact, at this point in history a focus on efficiency is likely a major strategic mistake.  The infrastructure needs to be built up first, and then in the future as uptake increases, one can economize.  It's called economies of scale for a reason.

The situation quickly gets more complicated.  Colleges, CTLs, professional development groups likely do not have good estimates of the activation energy required for uptake of student-centered pedagogies (or are even aware to think about it this way).  Further, as we develop more sophisticated teaching frameworks, the complexity of professional development and the specific supports needed by faculty become more technical and discipline specific.  The activation energy is dependent on the PD available, the subject matter, and the varies by instructor, course, and institutional environment.  Teaching Calculus isn't the same as teaching Math for Elementary Teaching or Topology.

Further, an echo from the past that continues to be felt today that inhibits progress on implementation is the factory model mindset.   Lingering to this day is the sense that instructors are delivery devices for information.  With the factory mindset is the belief that fixes to the system are in the form of tweaking courses, chipping away at the margins, and changing textbooks.  This is one reason why I am presenting the activation energy concept for education reform.  When we view instructors as delivery devices and/or underestimate for whatever reason the real effort necessary to become an effective IBL instructor, then the level of support and resources allocated to the problem is too low.   Invariably some new IBLers will struggle (due to inadequate preparation), and then the next, linked fallacy that results is something like, "I can't teach via IBL" or "IBL doesn't work at my institution."

The Pendulum.  There exists a defeatist belief among some in education that there is an education pendulum, and that's just the way it is.  Things repeat like a sinusoidal function, over and over again.   I've written about this before here.  Those weary of repeated efforts to make changes have a reason to be this way, and I am sympathetic to a degree.  They've seen things swing one way and then another, and those with hopes for a brighter future have seen their efforts crash and and burn, which is highly demoralizing.  The activation energy idea sheds some light on the matter.   Let's think of it as an absurdly flawed road trip implementation.  If we put in only half the gasoline needed for the trip, and each time we get towed back home, then one interpretation of these events is that this is what vacations are about. We go, don't make it to your destination, because we run out of gas. Then get towed home.  Hence the pendulum.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Education is a human construction.  It's not like the stars and the moon, where we have no way to affect the universe outside our planet in significant ways (as of today).  We built it.  We can change it.   If we follow our own teaching philosophy, then we should ask good questions.  Why is there a pendulum?  What are the causes?  Is there a better way?

Let's the put 100+10 estimate into context relative to current institutional practices.  Faculty training programs often have 1-2 days of "new faculty orientation" or a weekly seminar that meets for 1 hours.  More or less this is an order of magnitude below what I am seeing as necessary, without considering the nature and quality of the programs.  It is fairly well known that current practices of TA training or new instructor training are not sufficient to address the broader uptake problem, where low percentages of faculty in STEM actually use proven, student-centered teaching methods.  With the activation energy perspective, we can start to quantify how much more effort is needed and what it would cost.  While we are below the mark that I estimate is necessary with current practices, on the positive side we know ways to get people past the activation energy.  Solutions exist!

On a personal teacher level, getting started with IBL is hard.  IBL, however is a "sticky" idea in the sense that once instructors use it well, they stick with it.  Indeed, once you see your students think creatively and transform how they think and think of themselves as learners, there's no going back.  And that's easily a worthwhile 100+10 investment!