About This Webinar
Join MIT Blossoms and Share My Lesson for a webinar on a program which adopts an active, inquiry-based pedagogy for STEM lessons.
This presentation will be by MIT Professor Richard Larson, Co-founder of the MIT BLOSSOMS initiative, a program designed to assist teachers in adopting an active, inquiry-based pedagogy for STEM lessons. BLOSSOMS hosts an online library of over 200 free STEM video lessons for middle and high school classes (http://blossoms.mit.edu/). Professor Larson will focus in on three BLOSSOMS math lessons that demonstrate a pedagogy featuring rich, real-world learning tasks that foster students’ mathematical thinking and develop their understanding and intuitive approaches to problem solving. Each lesson is phenomenon-based, stated as real-world problems, situations that we can encounter on any given day. The first lesson deals with averages, not with the formula or computation, but with developing true understanding of what an average is and how to apply it or to be wary of it -- in real life situations. The second lesson deals with designing delivery routes using a town map, such as a postman delivering mail. Gently introducing the students to graph theory, this lesson opens with a student in-class contest. The third lesson introduces students to the general ways of thinking in uncertain environments, involving probabilities. The phenomenon: Winning a car in a TV game show.
