2. Blogging
3. Jun 16, 2013

On Friday, June 14 I gave a 15 minute talk in one of the parallel session at the Legacy of R.L. Moore Conference in Austin, TX. The Legacy Conference is the inquiry-based learning (IBL) conference. In fact, it’s the only conference that is completely devoted to the discussion and dissemination of IBL. It’s also my favorite conference of the year. It’s amazing to be around so many people who are passionate about student-centered learning.
This was my fourth time attending the conference and I plan on attending for years to come.

Here is the abstract for the talk that I gave.

In this talk, the speaker will relay his approach to inquiry-based learning (IBL) in an introduction to proof course. In particular, we will discuss various nuts and bolts aspects of the course including general structure, content, theorem sequence, marketing to students, grading/assessment, and student presentations. Despite the theme being centered around an introduction to proof course, this talk will be relevant to any proof-based course.

The target audience was new IBL users. I often get questions about the nuts and bolts of running an IBL class and my talk was intended to address some of the concerns that new users have. I could talk for days and days about this, but being limited to 15 minutes meant that I could only provide the “movie trailer” version.

Below are the slides from my talk.

One of my goals was to get people thinking about the structure they need to put in place for their own classes. When I wrote my slides, I had a feeling that I couldn’t get through everything. I ended up skipping the slide on marketing, but in hindsight, I wish I would have skipped something else instead. Two necessary components of a successful IBL class are student buy-in and having a safe environment where students are willing to take risks. Both of these require good marketing and I never had a chance to make this point. Maybe next year, I will just give a talk about marketing IBL to students.