Sharing wisdom, teacher to teacher
How do you teach math students to speak and write effectively about what they do? Crucially, how do you teach their teachers — themselves mathematicians — how to impart and evaluate these skills?Faced with this problem, a group of instructors in MIT’s Department of Mathematics decided that many heads are better than one. They began brainstorming ways to encourage teacher-to-teacher collaboration, bridging educators with similar challenges in different courses and from semester to semester. Now, they’ve developed a tool they believe will be useful to educators across academic fields, at MIT as well as other universities. The team calls the Web-based tool the Educational Collaboration Space (ECS), and it is available at ecs.mit.edu; download is free for everyone. “There’s a lot of software about students communicating with each other and students communicating with their professor, but there’s not very much about building a community of educators,” says Haynes Miller, a...