Both organizers are co-principal investigators of the project “Discovering the Art of Mathematics” (www.artofmathematics.org) which is dedicated to bringing inquiry-based learning into mathematics classrooms. While the project was originally designed to work with faculty at the college or university level, both organizers have taken the work into the schools (K-12) on an ongoing basis. Additionally to co-authoring 11 freely available books with inquiry activities appropriate for high school and college level they also wrote a freely available electronic book about pedagogy in the inquiry classroom, including lots of videos, see https://www.artofmathematics.org/classroom.

For K-12 professional development, the organizers have done year long support of several local school districts, including mentoring teachers, co-teaching in the classrooms, bringing college students into the classrooms on a regular basis, facilitating K-16 professional learning communities and helping teachers develop inquiry-based materials. The college level workshops are listed at https://www.artofmathematics.org/workshops-professional-development. Additionally, both organizers have extensive experience in teaching pre-service teachers at the primary and secondary level.

Workshop

Using active learning and inquiry approaches in the mathematics classroom has positive effects on students’ beliefs, attitudes and learning outcomes, see for instance the study by Freeman et al. (2014). Yet it is difficult for teachers to make the shift from traditional lecture style to a more active classroom happen, partially because most of us only experienced traditional teaching ourselves. In this workshop the participants first experienced inquiry-based learning as students. We then used the shared experience to discuss inquiry-based teaching and learning: what does it feel like as a student, what gets in the way of faculty exploring this way of teaching, and what are some of the many tools helpful for teaching successfully using inquiry (see Ecke & von Renesse, 2015 or https://artofmathematics.org/classroom/mathematical-conversations). The 90-minute workshop allowed participants to engage deeply in thinking about inquiry—from a student and a teacher practice perspective.