S tan Yoshinobu didn’t invent inquiry-based learning, a method of instruction that replaces the time-honored lecture with student-led presentations and group work. That credit goes to the late mathematician Robert Lee Moore, who taught at the University of Texas from 1920 to 1969.
What Mr. Yoshinobu, a math professor at California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, has done is to democratize the inquiry-based method. Over the course of a decade, he has convinced hundreds of fellow mathematicians that the strict “Moore method” can be adapted to any classroom context. (While Moore’s legacy has been tarnished by racist attitudes he held toward black students, his contributions to mathematics remain intact.)
On his own, and now as a co-director of the Academy of Inquiry Based Learning, Mr. Yoshinobu has run a series of workshops that guide professors in undergraduate math courses through the process of converting from lectures to an inquiry-based format. But he doesn’t insist on a complete overhaul, allowing participants to adopt what works for them.
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“Stan has been a key figure in helping people see this as a continuum,” says Sandra Laursen, a researcher at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who has studied student outcomes in inquiry-based courses. “The ‘big tent’ is what we talk about now,” she says.
In inquiry-based classrooms, students learn not by listening but by doing, working through problems in a collaborative atmosphere that encourages risk-taking. They are the team, and the professor is the coach, guiding students to their own answers rather than presenting them with the solutions.
That’s a major shift from the traditional mathematics classroom, where the professor lectures and the students absorb the information and attempt to apply it afterward.
It’s not an easy pivot for instructors to make. To convert to the inquiry-based approach, they must transform not only the way they teach but also the way they evaluate students. They must redesign their syllabi and choose new textbooks or create materials to supplement the required reading. Remaking a single course can take a couple of hundred hours, says Mr. Yoshinobu.
B ut there is evidence that the effort can pay off, particularly for female students. Research by Ms. Laursen and others has found that inquiry-based courses increase women’s confidence in their mathematical abilities, leveling the playing field between the sexes. Much of the change is attitudinal — women aren’t actually performing worse in traditional math courses; they just think they are.
Research has found that inquiry-based courses increase women’s confidence in their abilities.
Some of that increased confidence may stem from efforts by Mr. Yoshinobu and other advocates of inquiry-based learning to destigmatize mistakes. In his syllabi, Mr. Yoshinobu emphasizes that “it’s OK to be stuck,” and that growth is based “on error recovery, not mistake avoidance.” Five percent of the grade in his course for prospective elementary-school teachers is based on “productive failure.”
Still, getting students to embrace a new way of learning can be a challenge. Many college students, accustomed to professors’ telling them how to solve a problem, don’t appreciate being told to figure it out themselves.
Mike Ion, who was introduced to the inquiry-based method as a sophomore in one of Mr. Yoshinobu’s courses, says he saw some initial pushback from his classmates. But as the course progressed, he says, “people got used to it.”
“IBL made me finally critically think about why things were happening,” says Mr. Ion, who is now pursuing a Ph.D. in math education at the University of Michigan. “I felt like for the first time I was thinking for myself.”
Mr. Yoshinobu was trained under traditional lecture methods and taught that way himself early in his career. But when he discovered that his students weren’t grasping deeper math concepts, he decided to try a different approach. He went to a conference on inquiry-based learning, found a mentor, and redesigned an upper-level math course. “When I saw how students were waking up and asking better questions,” he says, he became a convert.
He organized the first IBL workshop for undergraduate-math instructors in 2006 and has helped run or plan a dozen workshops since then. Close to 400 professors have attended the workshops.
Sean Sather-Wagstaff, an associate professor of mathematical sciences at Clemson University, is one of them. Long intrigued by the learning method, he had tried a version of it at a previous institution, with some success.
But when his experiment in “do it yourself IBL” failed at Clemson, he decided to seek professional help. He spent a week at one of Mr. Yoshinobu’s workshops this past summer mapping out a plan to remake an abstract algebra course. His goal is to limit lectures to just five minutes per month.
“That’s a scary thing to do, and it’s a scary thing to ask students to do if they’ve never done it before,” he says. “It’s not a complete paradigm shift, but it’s as close as you can get.” The workshop, he says, gave him the skills and the confidence “to try it again.”
It’s a risk not everyone is willing to take. While there’s a growing consensus that students benefit from active learning, many faculty members in mathematics remain attached to the lecture.
Mr. Yoshinobu acknowledges this resistance but says the profession is moving — if slowly. In an effort to change more minds, he’s creating regional consortia of inquiry-based-learning advocates and training fellow converts to lead workshops. And he’s willing to be patient.
“Fundamentally, teaching is a cultural activity,” he says. “To change it is going to take a long time.”
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