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Building Thinking Classrooms: Planning for Winter 2024

 I am hosting a professional learning community for my state-level organization (SBCTC) and am sharing some thoughts on how I am planning my next term, using the Building Thinking Classrooms ( BTC ) framework. Below is the post I made on December 20th 2023 to our internal discussion forum. If you have thoughts, questions, or ideas about the BTC framework, post it below! ------------------------------  I am teaching MATH 104 Finite Mathematics with Support next term, and want to weave thinking questions throughout the course . This corequisite support course allows students can enter the course with below college level placement, and earn college credit in one term instead of two. These students are majoring in business, accounting, or other programs, eventually need to take MATH&148 Business Calculus. The course covers linear equations, systems of linear equations, linear programming, the Simplex method, functions (polynomial, rational, exponential, logarithmic), financial math, a
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Four Faculty-Focused Email Tips

Emails suck. As a faculty member I have to spend large parts of my day responding to emails, to serve what Cal Newport calls "the hyperactive hivemind" where decisions are made by this constant back and forth of emails. Faculty can't eliminate emails completely, but I have found a few things to help me manage my email load, which could help others. Two precautions:  1. Each of our email systems are different, yet most will have a version of what I am suggesting. I use Outlook for my work email, and I am confident that these ideas could work for you in Gmail, Mail on Mac, etc.  2. Just as our email systems are different, you may use a different learning management system (LMS) than what my institution uses, Canvas. This is not a big deal as most (Moodle, Blackboard, etc.) have settings similar to what I use.  Now that I've gotten that out of the way, here are four tips to reduce how much time, effort, and energy you spend on emails as a faculty member. 
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Chat GPT, Stats, and Math: What are we going to do?

Along with everyone else freaking out about Chat GPT ( John Dickerson did a nice segment on CBS ) I thought I might test it out with a few basic questions from classes I teach. This year my focus is on introduction to statistics, so I thought I would start by asking it a few open-ended and computational questions. 
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Education Research Writer: Dual-classing Science Writing and Education Writing

As an educator for a few years (uh...16?) I'm seeing a kind of 'blank spot' in the education landscape; individuals who take education research, and write articles and produce other media promoting the teaching practices from this research.  Contrast that with science writers who make up a whole industry of reading current science research, and writing for publications like Popular Science, National Geographic, and other national magazines. Sure, we might have organizations or institutions ( PERTS , the Rand Corporation , Dana Center , etc.) that create initiatives to support the implementation of one set of best practices or another, but we don't have individuals writing about the most recent advances in education research. Granted, there are breakthrough topics every so often that get printed, seemingly everywhere, like the growth mindset based on Dr. Carol Dweck's work. At the same time education topics are not a regular part of most American's media diet.  A
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Comment on Joe Pitkin's blog post The School Down the Hill From the Ivory Tower

 I wrote a comment responding to my colleague Joe Pitkin's blog post The School Down the Hill From the Ivory Tower . In it he talks about the democratization of information through the internet, and the role community colleges play in higher education. Here is my comment, mainly so I can have it in an accessible spot for me to reference later.  Thank you for sharing your thoughts Joe! I’m having similar ‘big’ thoughts about community colleges and higher education in general. You’re right, our commitment to providing a high-quality, personalized education to anyone who walks in our doors is our value proposition, and we need support from the state, administrators, and colleagues to do that. Too often I see people from other departments operate under a scarcity model of resources, that to get ‘mine’ I must take from ‘yours’. That isn’t going to get us anywhere. Where I see the biggest opportunities for growth in higher education is the mismatch between the new role of educators and t
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Fall 2021: More on Standards Based Grading

I'm in a book club with some colleagues this summer, and we are reading Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman. I've been meaning to write summaries of my thoughts after our assigned readings, but may wait to do a full book review. We're at Chapter 10 and it feels a bit of a cliff hanger; including any  assignments or activities in a student's grade other than assessments of their understanding is inequitable. Our (seemingly) natural response has been to reject this as we have learned that high stakes assessments likely do more harm than good, especially for BIPOC students. The author has alluded to some solutions, which we will dive into in Chapters 11 (Practices that support hope and a growth mindset) and 12 (Practices that 'life the veil').  During our last meeting standards based grading came up, and most people seemed interested but intimated. In previous posts I've mentioned how I am balancing flipping my classroom and creating a standards based grading sch
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Fall 2021: Thinking about modalities

 A colleagues (If you're reading this, hi Allie!) has been asking some really good questions about how we'll return to campus, and what the experience of everyone teaching online might mean for our face-to-face (F2F) courses. In responding to one of her emails I started the following chart comparing different aspects of online, F2F, and flipped classes. I've since added a few more items.    Online F2F Flipped Timed Assessment Logistics Range of times, online, could be submitted on paper, some auto-evaluated and some faculty evaluated. Specific time and place, on paper, there could be some variation in questions among students, faculty evaluated. Same as F2F Timed  Assessment Questions By necessity of online honesty could be more conceptual, but likely includes computational questions. More computational, but could shift towards more conceptual if more o
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