Rose Asera, Ph.D
Rethinking Pre-college Math
Summer Institute Aug 22, 2012
Move into a situation with questions: starting with
questions will take you places that starting with
answers won’t.
Formal inquiry: an organized form of professional
development that involves forming questions,
gathering and analyzing data, and acting on and
sharing results
Informal inquiry: nurturing your intellectual
curiosity and asking questions. Inquiry
becomes a habit of mind.
 Your
college ?
 Your
department ?
 Your
classroom ?
What do you pay attention to in order to
describe these cultures ?

Culture is the connective tissue between formal
changes (policy, structure, content) and individual
experiences

Can someone ‘change’ culture? (Can someone
‘culture’ change?)

What are the levers of culture change?

How are the characteristics of the culture a resource
to you? an obstacle to you?

What is the relationship of culture change to
changing policy/ structure/ individuals?

What are the characteristics of a culture of inquiry?
 What
have you done that has shifted the
culture in your department?
 How
is the departmental culture
communicated to new people or part-time
faculty? to students?
 What
do you do to establish the culture in
your classroom?
 Has
changing instruction changed the way
you see students and learning?

What works /for whom /under what conditions ?

What do you know about your students’ lives,
aspirations, & challenges? What strengths do students
bring to the classroom?

How does knowing your students affect your
teaching?

What does learning look like?

How do students view mathematics?

What is the relationship between the data patterns
and your observations in the classroom?
Besides colleagues in your department, whose
work is affected by changes you are making
in developmental math?
 Who
are your allies? Do you have connections
across campus boundaries and silos? Why is
this important?
 Who
needs to be involved in the changes?
Who needs to be aware and informed?
 Community
& colleagues
 Collaboration
 Students
& conversation
as Co-inquirers
 WHAT
ARE YOUR NEXT QUESTIONS?

Taking your teaching sensibility-





Intuition
Hunches
Observations
Puzzles
Dilemmas
Questions
Seriously and systematically
pursuing evidence to gain more
insight into student learning
& Sharing it
Who are my students?
 Katie
Hern’s students at Chabot College
http://www.cfkeep.org/html/stitch.php?s=196
12639508781
What are we teaching?
 Jay
Cho & Friends at Pasadena City College
http://www.cfkeep.org/html/stitch.php?s=131
43081975303&id=87553800444634
 How
do we know they are learning?
 Laura
Graff and friends at College of the
Desert
http://www.cfkeep.org/html/stitch.php?s=148
32740290866&id=34947815104339
The cycle of inquiry:
SHAPE
QUESTION
GATHER
DATA
MAKE YOUR
WORK PUBLIC
ANALYZE
DATA
ACTION
An outcome of inquiry is more inquiry ….
 What
is?
 What’s
 What
works? How?
 What’s
 Why?
the problem?
possible?
 Campus
data– trends, patterns, big pictures
 Classroom observations
 Examples of student work
 Results of a common assessment
 Think-alouds
 Student surveys, interviews and focus groups
 Looking outward as well as inward: evidence
from other educational settings (research
literature, cases, etc)
 Finding
patterns

Quantitative analysis- when are statistics useful?

Qualitative analysis – beyond anecdotes - what
are the patterns of response?

Finding outliers: when are outliers worthy of
attention?
 How
does what you have learned affect the
situation?
 What
 Are
actions do your data indicate?
there changes that can be made?
 How
is inquiry part of implementation? Of
ongoing improvement?
 To
reflect and reconstruct the process
 To critically reexamine data
 To tell the story
 To make public and invite conversation
 To share ongoing questions
 For others to build on
 To
gain different perspectives on the
problem
 In isolation (classroom/office/campus) you
can’t see the dimensions or magnitude of the
problem
 You understand more about your context by
seeing other contexts
 The problems we are addressing are bigger
than any one person “I never think it’s my
problem alone”
Students
 bring a new perspective to data gathering
and analysis
 have access to informal aspects of other
students’ lives
 can translate across cultures
 may have tech savvy
 Increased
local knowledge of teaching and
learning & common language
 Greater understanding of students and their
learning process
 Shared responsibility for student learning
 Integration of professional learning in work
responsibilities
 Analysis to action
 More inquiry
 Inquiry becomes a habit or mindset
 It
doesn’t all work
 Finding
things that don’t work is part of
inquiry
 Sharing
mistakes is part of learning and is
very valuable (and not always easy)
 Teacher
as Researcher
 Faculty Learning Communities
 Reflective Inquiry
 Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
 Faculty Inquiry Groups
 Formative Evaluation
SPECC
http://carnegiefoundation.org/previouswork/undergraduate-education
http://www.cfkeep.org/html/stitch.php?s=28144
08673732&id=94404660812025
Faculty Inquiry Network
http://facultyinquiry.net/
Contact: roseasera@gmail.com