Participants had the opportunity to learn more about organizing and
working cooperatively outside the classroom with math and non-math
colleagues, administrators, and staff. Team building is rarely discussed
from the point of view of how change comes about, since discussions
usually move to the course/classroom issues...technology, content,
pedagogy, assessment. These workshops placed greater emphasis on the
programmatic planning aspects of change than many participants expected.
The remaining three workshops in St. Louis, Arizona, and New York will
offer similar rare opportunities to experience some of the important
underdiscussed issues... how to build teams amongst colleagues, effective
cooperative planning, what to do when the fires break out and the rhetoric
becomes unproductive.
Issues of process in bringing change to the level of possibilities and
beyond that to level of planning are perhaps the most overlooked
difficulties in making changes that can be studied for effectiveness and
revised later when necessary rather than tested and dismissed without
analysis for a return to older methods which ignore the current state of
technology and understanding of effective learning.
It's the planning to improve the learning of our students that should
drive the adoptions of technology and textbooks, not the textbooks and
technology that force the change. How we plan effects the results of our
planning.:)
Martin
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Martin Flashman * "Let's make math more visual. *
Department of Mathematics * Let's make calculus sensible. *
Humboldt State University * Let's make change sensibly." *
Arcata, CA 95521 **********************************
EMAIL: mef2@axe.humboldt.edu Phone: 707-826-4950 (office/voice mail)
flashman@axe.humboldt.edu http://www.humboldt.edu/~mef2/ 707-826-3140 (FAX)
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