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Committee report report
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Teaching
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By DocTurtle
Posted Sun Feb 08, 2009 at 05:52:15 PM PDT
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So far this semester's offering of homework committee reports has been of refreshingly high quality, especially those in my Foundations of Mathematics class.
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[Author's note: Greetings, YMN folks! My name is Patrick Bahls, and I'm an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. I regularly write about math and teaching and teaching math on my blog, Change of Basis. I was recently invited to contribute to YMN, and I am eager to take up that invitation. Thus, this first post. I will frequently cross-post between YMN and my own blog, and I'd be delighted if you'd care to dialogue with me on either or both sites: I'm always on the lookout for fresh ideas and engaging correspondence on all things mathematical.]
I've been meaning for some time now to say a bit about how the homework committees are going this semester, since so far I've been proud of their smooth functioning. (For the YMN crowd, you can read a number of my older blog posts about using homework committees here. Briefly, it's a peer-review technique I use to encourage students to (1) begin their homework more promptly, (2) engage in self-authorship, (3) grow accustomed with the frequent multiplicity of correct solutions, and (4) develop their teamwork skills. Students volunteer to serve on committees tasked with reviewing and offering feedback on their peers' drafts of solutions to particular homework problems. After reviewing all submitted drafts they lead a brief class discussion on the problem they considered and return the drafts to their respective authors, who then have time to revise their work before submitting a final draft one class period later.)
There have been four reports in each of Foundations and Abstract II, and despite their relative inexperience with the genre, the former students' committee reports have been stronger than those of their Abstract II counterparts: they've skillfully avoided simply answering the problem placed before them (this was a major problem the first semester I asked students to serve on homework committees), they've intentionally made use of the course's writing stylesheet (the now-infamous Four Cs), and they've done a marvelous job of indicating common pitfalls, clever solutions, and helpful hints.
When the first homework set was handed in there was a little misunderstanding concerning exactly who received which draft of which problem, and as a consequence I was given a glimpse of the feedback the students were offering to one another on the drafts submitted to the committees. It was heartening: the few comments I saw were meaningful, respectful, and helpful without being too much so.
The quality of these students' committee work greatly exceeds that of the students in the first Foundations course in which I assigned committee problems. Back in "the day" the kids'd frequently just get up in front of the class and solve the given problem for their friends, resulting in a couple dozen nearly identical eventual submissions in which the students would faithfully render every jot and tittle (whether correct or not) of their colleagues' proffered solution. During the past couple of semesters I've very deliberately pointed out that it is not the job of the committee to perform this disservice.
Word's gotten out.
So, props.
I'd be interested in knowing what sorts of peer-review activities other Network members use. How do you encourage your students to look over each others' work? How do you encourage them to gain confidence and to assume their roles as authors of mathematics?
I'm delighted to share my ideas with the readers at the Young Mathematicians' Network, and look forward to learning more from you all! |
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