Dear everyone,
we hope your terms are off to a good start! We have gotten some questions about you folks becoming facilitators, so here are some answers, and please post more questions below!
Best,
Rosalie and Sara
Here are some instructions / suggestions on how to become a facilitator at your institution:
1. If you did not do all assignments, do them first! (No need mecessarily to have a look at ALL the options in an assignment, but make sure you try at least one.)
2. Have a look at the facilitator's guide in the library, at least starting with the sections on each assignment and webinar. You can read the stuff about how to conduct sessions etc a bit later.
3. Think about how many sessions you will want to have, and how long they should be. We had three 1h30 sessions together, and you might agree they felt rushed. We also never discussed assignments explicitly together. I have run this at my institution in 7 sessions of 1h instead (with about 16-18 participants, not the 40-70 we had here). Each webinar was split in two parts, with some time to discuss assignment 2. The last session was time for us to reflect back over the whole thing, give some feedback, and think about what we wanted to do next (we opted for a reading group, I can tell you more about that once it hits the ground).
4. Think about whether you want to put a cap on the number of people, and who you want to invite (all students from a particular grade or course, undergrads, grad students, post-docs, faculty, staff, your math colleagues or also others, etc). This is geared specifically to math people but computer science folks often get a lot out of it too. Engineers and maybe other science people though don't seem to get so much out of the first webinar on the definition of a mathematician, since stereotypes about engineers in particular are quite different in fact!
5. Think about making groups -- remember we asked you at first to tell us if you rpefered to be with certain people. I sometimes made my groups to have all undergrads together (in 2 separate groups really since there were a bunch), all grads together, and all faculty together. Sometimes I mixed them up, and of course we had large group discussions as well with everyone in. Also, keep in mind some participants might have some reason for not wanting to be in a group with another person in aprticular -- ask for that, and welcome their requests by listening, not judging, accomodating and showing support (without asking for personal details, unless they want to share)!
6. If there is some way for students or staff to be recognized for doing this work (on their transcript say) then by all means try to arrange for that!
7. Think about using Desmos as we did, or some other online platform to share documents and for people to continue discussing (I used google docs, I can say more if you are interested).
8. You might need to think first about finding a few allies in your workplace, in case you get some pushback? Or think about how to "market" this?
That's all I have for now, please post here if you have more questions about this or anything else related to facilitating!
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Rosalie Bélanger-Rioux, PhD (she/her/hers)
Faculty Lecturer, McGill University
Conversations for the Mathematics Community
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