Abstract/Description:
John Dewey pointed out that one of the problems with the US K-12 educational system is that when a teacher retires, they take all of their accumulated knowledge with them out of the educational system. This is largely the case with undergraduate mathematics education as well. The available instructional resources for undergraduate mathematics instructors lack key features required to build a robust knowledge base for teaching. Few resources address the everyday work of teaching undergraduate mathematics by exploring the details of teaching specific content in a specific context, how to reason through various possible instructional decisions, and how the instructional decisions connect with or help to deepen student mathematical thinking. In this talk I discuss the idea of Lesson Analysis (LA), a process for generating instructional knowledge, and the closely associated written genre, Lesson Analysis Manuscripts (LAMs), to store and share important instructional knowledge largely absent in current resources. LAMs are a type of detailed lesson plan developed to solve a particular problem of practice. However, the emphasis is on understanding the reasoning behind the instructional decisions, usually justified through student mathematical thinking, not on the particular instructional choices of the lesson. I discuss how LA fits into a broad SoTL umbrella, the key features of a LAM, and explain where to publish LAMs for the undergraduate mathematics teaching community.
Presenters:
Doug Corey, Brigham Young University