Pedagogy, Statistics, and Physics

We are pleased to announce an introductory statistics & Probability workshop for Haitian professors. This workshop will be held in Port-au-Prince on March 24-27, 2014. This is the fourth workshop in a 5-year series whose main goal is to implement and evaluate learning gains achieved through faculty- and curriculum-development activities based on Kreyòl-based Open Education Resources for science and math courses in Haitian schools and universities.

This workshop will describe MIT’s approach to teaching introductory probability and statistics. Rather than lecturing, we “flip” the classroom: students prepare for class by reading and answering questions at home; during class students actively solve problems in groups under our guidance. Workshop participants will act as students and teachers in examples of a flipped class period. We’ll also explore different modes of active learning. This workshop will provide participants with a good basis for creation of lesson plans using active learning resources in Kreyol, and assessment of student learning gains.
Specifically, by the end of the workshop, the participants will be able to:

  • Create student learning objectives that use active learning materials
  • Describe best practices for teaching / student learning
  • Create instructional activities for classroom that include active learning
  • Use active-learning strategies in a variety of settings and under a variety of conditions
  • Create formative and summative assessments that will measure student learning from the active-learning materials
  • Describe how they will collect and record data to document student learning from materials
  • Conduct a selected portion of a lesson using active learning strategies
  • Evaluate lessons conducted by peers

This workshop is designed, not only to enhance the use of active learning methods by participants in their own classroom, but also to prepare the way for an outreach by Haitian participants to other Haitian academics, along the lines of the “séminaires itinérants” that are currently being designed by a consortium of Haitian universities (Faculté des Sciences and École Normale at the Universitéd’ Étatd’ Haïti, ÉcoleSupérieured’Infotroniqued’Haïti, UniversitéQuisqueya, UniversitéCaraïbe).

The MIT instructors at the workshop are:
Pedagogy, Assessment & Evaluation Glenda Stump
Statistics & Probability, Jeremy Orloff and Jonathan Bloom

The deadline for registration is Monday, February 10, 2014 or when all the slots are filled.