Facilitators:

Wesley Shumar and Kristina Lasher

Department of Culture and Communication Drexel University wes@drexel.edu The Math Forum Drexel University kristina@mathforum.org

Collaborative Learning Workshops at CSCL 2003

Workshop Summary

Participants will use The Math Forum Online Mentoring Guide (OMG) to learn how to mentor students in the Problem of the Week (PoW) environment.

Workshop Description

This workshop will be offered for each of the five 2-hour slots. The facilitators will explain the goal of the workshop and the procedures to be followed. The first hour of the workshop participants will have the opportunity to use The Math Forum’s Online Mentoring Guide. The OMG was designed to be an online collaborative curriculum unit where users learn how to mentor k-12 students in math. The mentoring takes place in The Math Forum Problem of the Week environment, a weekly non-routine challenge problem done but students from around the world. The goal of the OMG is to provide an environment where pre-service teachers, and other interested parties can learn how kids think about math outside of the busy classroom context. In the second hour of the workshop, participants will get an opportunity to assess this mentoring environment and then will be encouraged to think about directions the OMG could be taken. Key questions the workshop will address are:

What is mathematical thinking? How is it encouraged in the PoW environment? What can mentors learn from observing and interacting with students in this environment?

What does good mentoring look like? This question will allow us to address what is mentoring? How can it be used to help kids learn to think mathematically? What affordances does an online environment like the PoW make possible for mathematical thinking and mentoring?

How can the OMG be made more interactive? What kinds of design features will help make this an online community of mentors and mentoring resources?