Course:MATH TAAP/2012/discussion

Discussion notes from meetings

As teachers we do experience similar changes that our students since we are learning how to teach
Scrapbook : good place to gather all the ideas we have for teaching
p. 218 (bottom of the page) quote about being entertaining or not : is it supported by research? is there reference about that? how could we design an experiment to measure that? what is/should be the definition of entertaining?
Does our style of presenting changes between the first-year course and seminar/formal presentation?
Are jokes good to help remember content? is good to use them in class?

Ideas for online activities :

Social Identity & Course Climate

Even people who want to be impartial have biases ! (for example unconsciously marking differently male and female students)
What are the elements that make us help people that are just under a passing grade?
We may have biases against people who never come to office hours, or didn't try to get help, especially if they were told to do so.
Inform students about stereotypes can help them overcome it, see this research paper

Ideas for online activities :

Online chatroom, answer questions on a forum, online lessons, online assignments, youtube videos, and many more (come up with whatever you want)...

About Practice & Feedback

importance of working on the integration steps
the difference between integration and application seem very thin, it would be good to precise it

Many students have only external motivation, they want to pass the course (because it is a requirement) and nothing else
What could we do about it? how could we make students more interested in the material itself?
- Present something mind blowing : something that everyone takes from granted and explain why it really works
- Ask students about their interests and incorporate that in examples and homework : give them some choice so that they own the course. Problem : do we do if there are many different interests ?
- Create a system in which students help/motivate each other; create supportive environment
- Make the content more concrete for students (one problem is that as instructors, we usually don't control the syllabus)
It is important for the students to use logic in many different contexts
- what kind of experiment could we set up to test this idea?

students have in general very fragmented knowledge
how could we help with that?
- present a concept map/diagram to explain the connections : probably ask students to create it themselves is more helpful
- do it throughout the term vs at the end as a summary task
Questions about concept maps : time consuming? quality? students' resistance?