This project provided evaluation and research support to the SPIGOT workshop leaders as they led professional development workshops for college mathematics instructors in teaching with student-centered inquiry-based learning (IBL) methods.  IBL approaches foster students' independent thinking and mathematical insights as they grapple with challenging problems and re-discover mathematical ideas rather than practicing procedures.  Students also develop communication skills by presenting their own work and responding to questions from their peers and instructors. The intensive, four-day SPIGOT workshops provide instructors with time and opportunity to learn, consider and plan to implement these student-centered teaching approaches. A strong follow-up support system helps instructors apply these methods in their own courses.

Our team observed the workshops and collected data from faculty participants before and after the workshops, and after instructors returned to their own campuses.  We used these data to help improve the workshop and to understand whether and how the workshops did indeed enable faculty to apply IBL in their own teaching.

The project has intellectual merit because the data show that the workshops were well planned and executed to address participants’ learning and practical needs. The workshop team worked closely to coordinate the components and provided highly skillful facilitation.  We developed an efficient, graphics-oriented “dashboard report” format to communicate evaluation results, and the leaders made good use of these data in making adjustments to their work.  Alongside the original project team, new facilitators were engaged as part of an ongoing strategy to “train the trainers” who can lead future professional development activities on IBL in mathematics.  

The project has broader impact because it showed that the workshops reached a large and diverse group of mathematics instructors, many of whom did begin teaching with IBL.  In all, the four summer workshops reached 138 mathematics instructors, over half of whom were women.  They represented diverse institutional types and varying career stages, but the largest groups came from four-year colleges (53%) and were early in their careers (61% had taught ≤5 years).  About 11% taught at minority-serving institutions.

We know that the workshop had a positive effect on attendees’ readiness for IBL teaching:  Surveys show that, on average, instructors’ knowledge, skills, beliefs and motivation around IBL teaching changed in positive directions after the workshop and were further improved or sustained at high levels one full academic year later.  

We also have good evidence that the instructors began to use IBL approaches.  Among the first three cohorts of workshop participants, implementation of IBL was impressively high: at least 73% of all participants used some IBL methods in the first year (some attendees did not respond to the follow-up survey so we do not know if they used IBL or not).  They used IBL in at least 180 different courses reaching almost 4600 students in just the first year following the workshop, and thousands more students are engaged as instructors continue to teach this way.

We have learned as well about the ways in which the workshop and especially the follow-up support helps instructors to use IBL.  Many workshop attendees take advantage of the IBL resources and face-to-face meeting opportunities that are offered.  High proportions participate in “e-mentoring” through an e-mail list for their workshop cohort where they can ask questions, share ideas, and support each other in the everyday triumphs and challenges of learning to teach with IBL. 

To better understand the function of the e-mentoring list, we analyzed the e-mail messages exchanged in the first year after the workshop using social network analysis, an approach that emphasizes the connections among initiating and responding messages.  We find that nearly half of all e-mail messages have a primary or secondary function expressing emotional support:  commiseration, celebration, gratitude, or friendship.  For example, someone may share a problem they are facing in their class, and others acknowledge that they too have experienced this problem—thus normalizing the idea that learning to teach in new ways can be hard work sometimes, as well as sharing ideas for solving the problem.  We have identified specific ways that workshop leaders can use the list to foster productive exchanges and supportive relationships among instructors, and we have already shared these with the next group of workshop leaders.  We are preparing a manuscript for publication to share these findings more widely with STEM faculty developers. 

Overall, our work shows that the SPIGOT workshops have been very successful in meeting the PI team’s goals and refining the workshop model to the point where it can be handed off to others.   Our evaluation team has developed strong and efficient mechanisms for monitoring and communicating both immediate feedback and longer-term outcomes of IBL implementation and sharing. In ongoing work, we will continue to learn more about how best to support and measure instructor professional development on active learning.

Last Modified: 03/06/2017
Modified by: Sandra L Laursen