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What is the "Common Vision"

• 5 professional organizations
• "reconsider undergraduate curricula and ways to improve education in the mathematical sciences"
• Participants include more than just these organizations, and included STEM and industy.
• Examined 7 guides. Identified common themes.

The status quo is unacceptable

Four areas

Here is their recommendation for everyone (community down to student) "In this report, we call on

• the community to
  1. update curricula,
  2. articulate clear path-ways between curricula driven by changes at the K–12 level and the first courses students take in college,
  3. scale up the use of evidence-based pedagogical methods,
  4. find ways to remove barriers facing students at critical transition points (e.g., placement, transfer) and
  5. establish stronger connections with other disciplines.
• Institutions should
  1. provide faculty with training, resources, and rewards for their efforts to adapt curricula,
  2. develop new courses, and incorporate pedagogical tools and technology to enhance student learning.
• Departments should
  1. update curricula,
  2. establish multiple pathways into and through majors, and
  3. move toward environments that incorporate multiple pedagogical approaches throughout a program.
• Instructors should
  1. present key ideas and concepts from a variety of perspectives,
  2. employ a broad range of examples and applications to motivate and illustrate the material,
  3. promote awareness of connections to other subjects, and
  4. introduce contemporary topics and applications.
• Students should
  1. learn to communicate complex ideas in ways understandable to collaborators, clients, employers, and other audiences."
• The following phrase has an implied, "We do not currently have an intriguing introduction to mathematics for all students". I completely agree.
  "While intellectual domains fragment and coalesce over time, a central task for mathematics faculty at institutions of higher education, and more broadly, the mathematical sciences community as a whole, is to create a coherent, intriguing introduction to collegiate mathematics for all students."
  This phase sought to effect changes in undergraduate mathematical sciences education in order to expand scientific knowledge and maintain a viable workforce in the United States. By reaching out to members of the five associations, we hoped to galvanize the mathematical sciences community and spur grassroots efforts to improve undergraduate education. Change is unquestionably coming to lower-division mathematics and statistics, and it is incumbent on the mathematical sciences community to ensure it is at the center of these changes, not on the periphery. We hope other individuals and groups will come alongside us in this effort, capitalize on the momentum we have built and goodwill we have established, and move this effort forward into a second phase focused on implementation initiatives.

Teaching Approach

How do we, as a department, fully participate in understanding and implementing the "Common Vision" or at least creating our own vision of what our lacking are.

Ideas:

• Have a course created for the department, called "Common Vision". Enroll us all as students, TA's, Teachers, Who knows. Send out weekly assignments (participate in a discussion board). Of course, participation if voluntary. You can stay out. Ideas need to be shared, they need to be discussed. They need to be refined. Enabling a "voting" mechanic could actually be useful. If we express an idea, and no one likes it, that might actually be worth knowing. This cannot be the only form of discussion though. Ideas should be talked about with others in a face-to-face setting. We should meet periodically (once a month?) and have a moderated discussion. I would love to facilitate that. This discussion should be done "as a whole" and in "small groups". We need our collective minds to come up with things we can do to improve our program and have a common vision of what our flaws are, as well as what actions to take. Part of this discussion needs to involve deciding what appropriate data to collect. Some times we may need training on new things. Let's find what we need, and then find a way to finance it. If we want to have any say on how mathematics will change in the future, we need to be proactive instead of reactive. Would this fly? Would people actually participate? One Monday a month? Hmm...
• Just meet once a semester and talk, and do nothing in between. Sounds pointless. Unless we have some kind of system in place to reflect on this, and think about it regularly, nothing will happen.

Questions we will discuss:

1. What does the status quo mean? What exactly are the common problems described by the document. Which problems do we see that we have in our own department? What are we doing to address these? What kind of data could we collect to see how we are doing? What kind of data do we already have? How should we proceed from here?
2. How do we update curricula mean? What is the problem with curricula? Why do we need to update it?
3. How do we articulate clear path-ways between curricula driven by changes at the K–12 level and the first courses students take in college?
4. How do we scale up the use of evidence-based pedagogical methods?
5. How do we find ways to remove barriers facing students at critical transition points (e.g., placement, transfer) ?
6. How do we establish stronger connections with other disciplines?

Proposal - a 14 week course, next semester. We meet, then discuss online for two weeks. Then meet again, discuss online. Each week we have a few goals. Identify things we are doing (if possible) to address this need. Identify problem points, or identify the fact that we lack information to determine if we have a problem. Have at least one action item of things we can change. Share this with our course polygons as appropriate.

Kim's thoughts - Common Vision Book Club. Not sure if that's the right connotation for education, but the idea is the same.

• We meet for 30-60 minutes every two weeks for an entire semester.
• At the meeting we kickoff a new topic (each of us are welcome to take point and have a discussion about something we are passionate about). We introduce the topic, share some thoughts to direct the discussion, and then have two weeks of forum posts and discussions about the topic.
• Start of next meeting is a conclusion of what we learned, what things we need to do, what data needs to be collected to know how to proceed, etc.
• I should have the class set up. I should start with an example topic (maybe leave BIG till later - or maybe now). I should add people who are interested, and maybe email the entire I-Learn discussion group (including online teachers). Then add people who are interested (ever expressed interest). Then let the discussion go from there. The only assignment over the weekend would be to read the executive summary (or just give that out on Monday... that's probably better).
• I think I would actually prefer to discuss the BIG issue. How do we do this? How do we meet all the needs? All this falls under "update curricula".
  • Externships? INL? IHC? Others? Is it possible, is there interest, to get something set up so we can all have such an opportunity?
  • Taking courses from other departments? What kind of interest? Is there a way to streamline the PDL process for such a request - make it pretty automatic or just let it be a department assigned PDL.
  • Learning to code - coding classes for faculty that are paid for by department (so courses from other departments, or even our own).
  • What about taking courses not from our university, such as MOOCS or places like Udacity - courses built by industry. Having exposure to things like this could help broaden our horizons of what is needed. Why not get certified in things. Does someone want to take certifications to be an actuary? Could we count this?
  • How do we get time in our classes to include all the demands. This can be a delicate balance. Do we have to give up abstraction to add applications? Is it really a dichotomy? Can they all be done at once? Share my 215 experience and how focusing on a specific application has done amazing things for the course.
  • Do we do a good job coordinating with our fellow disciplines (I need to visit with Brother Hat - maybe I should take quantum mechanics from him so I can correctly teach abstract algebra for his students as well as our students).