Traditional pedagogies often emphasize the authority of the instructor rather than empowering students to become independent and autonomous learners. In this talk, we will explore ways in which inquiry-based learning can be used to establish more democratic and less authoritarian learning environments. Drawing on research from social psychology, we will con-sider the potential of inquiry-based learning to promote the habits of mind that are essential to both civil discourse and constructive engagement in society.

Inquiry based learning is a teaching method that engages students in sense-making activities. Specifically, students are given tasks requiring them to solve problems, pose problems, conjecture, experiment, explore, create, and communicate...all those wonderful skills and habits of mind that mathematicians engage in regularly.  We are familiar with a myriad of approaches to this at the undergraduate and graduate levels.  However, to systematically reform mathematics education in this country will require also addressing K-12 mathematics instruction.   Many K-12 teachers find teaching in an inquiry-based format to be a daunting task, as most only ever experienced learning mathematics in a primarily procedural, lecture-based format.  However, the new Common Core State Standards place a high value on mathematical practices and sense making.  Thus, there is a strong need for mathematical professional development for practicing teachers that supports them in becoming more conversant with the mathematical practices.
The Math Teachers’ Circle program, developed by the American Institute of Mathematics in 2006, aims to meet this need by providing an innovative form of professional development in which mathematicians directly facilitate mathematical problem solving sessions with middle school teachers.  In this talk, we describe a typical Math Teachers’ Circle, showing why it can be considered an ideal form of inquiry based learning for practicing teachers, describing preliminary research results, and detailing how conference attendees can get involved with this program.

  The design of Emerging Scholars Programs (ESP) or Treisman-style Programs responds to Uri Treisman’s research from the late 1970s and early 1980s examining differences in student performance in calculus. To improve student success in calculus, ESPs use the mathematics as an anchor to build community around shared academic interests and encourage effective collaboration. We will explore how inquiry-based learning plays a central role in fostering the collaboration and challenge that permeate the ESP model and highlight the role of metacognition in this learning environment..

When thinking about IBL in introductory classes, there are many things to consider:  the necessary syllabus of the courses, the expertise and training of instructors, the goals and expectations of the students and the institution.  For many of us, introductory classes present a particular challenge on every level.  In this talk, we will explore an introductory class model that encourages an interactive-engaged classroom for ~5000 students per year, how the style is supported, and the reasons why we believe that model is an important support for the goal of our courses.

POGIL (Process oriented guided inquiry learning) is a student-centered research-based constructivist approach to teaching that has enjoyed great success in the chemistry community. We will discuss this method and how its group and activity structure make it different from other cooperative learning approaches. We will also talk about a current collaboration between chemistry POGIL experts and mathematics faculty to develop activities for calculus I and precalculus.