"Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen but understanding it for the first time."

- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

This has been my first year at Rockhurst University and, as most of my colleagues and students have figured out at this stage, I am a big fan of inquiry based learning. I incorporate this into my classes at varying levels and with varying success! The descriptions below are meant to give you a flavor of some of what I have tried in my classes this year.

2007/2008

Description

This number theory class focused on some topics in algebraic number theory and then the use of number theory in cryptography, particularly in public key cryptography. This was a very exciting class for me to teach for two reasons. The first being that algebraic number theory is my area of research and so I really enjoyed sharing my love for this subject with my students. The second reason is that I was able to teach this class in an entirely inquiry based way. The students were handed a notebook on the first day and from then on they filled this with the classes investigations into topics such as units, primes and irreducible, unique factorization and public key cryptography. I am incredibly proud of the work that they have done in this class. They agreed that this level of independent thinking had not been expected of them in any of their previous classes and yet they rose to the challenge and did some wonderful work. I have attached a sample of this work below.

Number Theory

Precalculus

Description

The Math Department at Rockhurst University have developed a great Precalculus class that focuses on how to use the mathematics learned in Precalculus to model data. For many of the students passing through our Precalculus class, this will be there only math class at Rockhurst and this gives them a way to use math in their field that they may not have understood before this experience. In Spring 2008, there were two sections of Precalculus being taught. I was teaching one and Dr. Guadarrama was teaching the other. We decided that we would like our students to have the real life experience of having to find data about a topic that interested them and then to have to find the best model they could to fit this data. We did this in the form of a final project that was worth 30% of the student’s grade and they had to produce both a poster and a report to share their work. Overall we were happy with the addition of the project to this class and want to offer this as an option to all the sections of Precalculus being taught next semester. However, we feel that there are some changes which need to be made to our instructions, scheduling and rubrics for this to provide the learning experience that we had envisioned for our students. As with a lot of things we didn’t get it totally right the first time! I plan to work this summer with another member of our department Dr. Shorter to develop this form of assessment further and to design a method of assessing the impact this project has on student learning. We also plan to link this project to Rockhurst’s Freshman Theme as most of the students who are in our Precalculus class are in their first year at Rockhurst. Below I have attached our current working rubric for the project. We are very excited about developing this further as we are hoping that it will be a truly valuable learning experience for our students.

Teaching