On Thursday, August 22, I was one of four speakers that gave a 20 minute talk during the Department of Mathematics and Statistics Teaching Showcase at Northern Arizona University. My talk was titled “An Introduction to Inquiry-Based Learning” and was intended to be a “high altitude” view of IBL and to inspire dialogue. I was impressed with the turn out. I think there were roughly 40 people in attendance, from graduate students to tenured faculty and even some administrators. Here are the slides for my talk.

If you take a look at the slides, you’ll see that I mention some recent research about the effectiveness of IBL by Sandra Laursen, et. al. During my talk, I provided a two-page summary of this research, which you can grab here (PDF).

After about 15 minutes, I transitioned into an exercise whose purpose was to get the audience thinking about appropriate ways to engage in dialogue with students in an IBL class. I provided the participants with the handout located here that contains a dialogue between three students that are working together on exploring the notions of convergence and divergence of series. After the dialogue, five possible responses for the instructor are provided. I invited the participants to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each possible response. It is clear that some responses are better than others, but all of the responses listed intentionally have some weaknesses. We were able to spend a couple of minutes having audience members share their thoughts. It would have been better to spend more time on this exercise. I wish I could take credit for the exercise, but I borrowed it from the folks over at Discovering the Art of Mathematics.

If you want to know more about IBL, check out my What the Heck is IBL? blog post over on Math Ed Matters.


Dana C. Ernst

Mathematics & Teaching

  Northern Arizona University
  Flagstaff, AZ
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Land Acknowledgement

  Flagstaff and NAU sit at the base of the San Francisco Peaks, on homelands sacred to Native Americans throughout the region. The Peaks, which includes Humphreys Peak (12,633 feet), the highest point in Arizona, have religious significance to several Native American tribes. In particular, the Peaks form the Diné (Navajo) sacred mountain of the west, called Dook'o'oosłííd, which means "the summit that never melts". The Hopi name for the Peaks is Nuva'tukya'ovi, which translates to "place-of-snow-on-the-very-top". The land in the area surrounding Flagstaff is the ancestral homeland of the Hopi, Ndee/Nnēē (Western Apache), Yavapai, A:shiwi (Zuni Pueblo), and Diné (Navajo). We honor their past, present, and future generations, who have lived here for millennia and will forever call this place home.