Members: Harvey Keynes (Discussion Leader), Al Taylor, Richard Falk, Leon Henkin, Lars-Ake Lindahl, Richard Montgomery, Dan Shapiro, Donald St. Mary, Donald Martin (Reporter), Susan Montgomery

Questions for Day 1

• • What is the current state of teaching in your department? What is good or bad about it?

• • What steps have you or your department taken to improve teaching?

• • How does being in a research department affect your teaching?

Questions for Day 2

• • What goals would you set for your department's teaching effort? (Consider curriculum, teaching practices, and infrastructure.)

• • What strategies would you recommend to attain those goals? What obstacles, such as workload or reward structure, stand in the way?

• • As a research department, what specific advantages or disadvantages do you have to offer your students?

Introduction.

Perhaps the single greatest challenge to research departments is the renewal of teaching. Many departments are under great external pressure to do a better job teaching and to pay more attention to the needs of students heading into technical, rather than research, careers; at the same time, internal incentives remain much as they have been: slanted towards research.

The group listed the following points as basic elements in the mission of a research department:

• • Research universities have a dual role of basic research and teaching.

• • Every faculty member should be a good teacher.

• • The measure of good teaching is that the students learn and become engaged in the learning process.

• • There should be an atmosphere in the department which is conducive to students learning.

• • Research departments should, in addition to the traditional work of preparing students for graduate school, provide mathematics education for the technical workforce and leadership in training of K-12 teachers.