Advanced Quantitative Reasoning: Mathematics for the World Around Us™ is a learner-centered course in which students learn by doing. Central to the text are high-quality problems, motivating questions, and engaging explorations that feature modeling and in-context problem solving. For some students, it is a completely different approach to “doing mathematics.” As such, many teachers and school districts have requested that AQR Press provide training to help them implement the course as it was envisioned by the authors. Listed below are several professional development options.
Online Professional Development
Monthly PD Webinars During the 2015–2016 School Year
To provide ongoing professional development support throughout the school year, AQR Press will sponsor eight monthly webinars from September 2015–April 2016. These complimentary webinars will focus on issues that have arisen on the Help Line.
- AQR Introductory Webinar | Slides (to see the whole webinar video, you can either download it to your computer or add it to your Dropbox)
- 9 September 2015 | Using Spreadsheets to Do Mathematics: Sequence, percent, recursion, and financial literacy
- Google Slideshow | PDF | Webinar Recording (to see the whole webinar video, you can either download it to your computer or add it to your Dropbox)
- 10 February 2016 | Introduction to Part II and Part III
- 13 April 2016 | End of the year Webinar
What Other AQR Teachers are Saying!
I wanted to share a happy AQR moment with you… We got rid of exams this year at my school, so I decided to be creative with the last couple days before break. I adapted the “spider crawling across the room” problem into a “minimize the amount of string needed to wrap a present” problem. (Shout out to Todd Edwards who presented this problem to us in Modspar the year I was a scholar.) Students were given their tissue box and a string and instructed to:
1. Arrive at a solution.
2. Draw a diagram of their solution.
3. Explain their problem solving methods/strategies.
AQR is the lowest math option for our seniors at our school, yet these students had some AMAZING solutions! Later in the day, I have some AP Calc students in my Stats class. They were curious about the problem stated on the board, and wanted to try it. They tried a couple times and asked what the formula was to solve it. “If you give us a formula and tell us what to do, we can solve it, but this is hard!” I shared that this is what engineers do – they create problems to solve themselves. This is also modeling. They were intrigued by this and 1 student (a prospective engineer major) took the box with him to Study Hall and spent the next 30 minutes working on a better method to solve this problem.
See, modeling goes beyond class boundaries. When students are curious, they are engaged, and real learning takes place.
Related Professional Development (not sponsored by AQR Press)
Advanced Teacher Capacity (ATC) summer 2016 institutes at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio
The ATC institutes are funded by an Ohio Board of Regents Improving Teacher Quality grant. Room and board are provided for qualifying participants. Graduate credit is available at a reduced tuition rate. QUANT is closely aligned with AQR (Common Core Edition) Parts I and II; Modspar is closely aligned with AQR (Common Core Edition) Parts III and IV. The ATC instructional team includes several AQR authors and experienced AQR teachers. For more information, contact Mary Harmison.