Professional Development

In order to continue to develop as a teacher, over the next year I want to focus on the following:

• developing strategies to help students who are underprepared for math courses to catch up and recieve support during the semester. Some activities, like the mastery quizzes seemed to help, but I would like more. A big part of the problem seemed to be getting them to come ask for help. Maybe instituting interviews at the beginning of the semester?

• more relaxed body language - especially during group work, I think my body language can be a little tense

Once I get a postdoc or professorship, I hope to find a teaching mentor. Ideally, they would be in my department, but if this is not possible, I will ask Justin Dunmyre (if I am at a small school) or Kelly Delp (if I am at a large school) to serve as a mentor. My hope is that a teaching mentor would be willing to observe my class from time to time, maybe once a year, and would allow me to observe their teaching.

I hope to become a  ProjectNExt Fellow once I graduate, so that I can be part of a broad conversation about teaching math at the postsecondary level.

Some resources that I have found to be very helpful in reflecting on my teaching and learning about other classrooms include:

• The art of mathematics  is a great resource on Inquiry Based Learning, and even includes videos so that you can get a feel for what an IBL class might feel like.
• The teaching blog of the American Mathematical Society. This includes some great essays.
• The blog Thales' Triangles discusses lots of great stuff about teaching math. The author has a lot of helpful information about Standards Based Grading.

I poke around on these blogs about once a month, and usually find something interesting or helpful. I will continue to add to this list as my teaching grows beyond just calculus.

Fall 2015 U-Wide GETSET Workshop

In Fall 2015 I attended a day-long conference for graduate students put on by the Center for Teaching Excellence. I'm including a short summary of things that were memorable and helpful.

• Advice of visiting professor: you can change the minds of students about your course by structuring your class to build useful skills. Insist that they participate during class and encourage questions.
• Professor Ron Harris-Warrick demonstrated what his classroom was like using conceptual questions, clickers, open-ended projects, and videos. It was both engaging and memorable. The privacy of clickers was really nice, because I didn't have any fear of appearing stupid, but on the other hand, I had a lot less at stake and so perhaps students might not think as deeply about the problem.

To do: Read more about clickers in the classroom. Are they as effective as polling with hand-raising?

Joint Math Meetings 2016

I went to a session on Flipping the Classroom, which was really helpful. Some particularly good suggestions for helping students to get the most out of before-class reading was to explicitly say what in the readings students should focus on, for example "on page 3, when they say `1/x is not a decreasing function' why is that true?" I liked the idea of directing student attention in this way.

I also went to a very exciting talk by Ben Braun which focused on his strategies for getting students out of an answer driven attitude and towards a process driven attitude, and trying to counter the fear that students sometimes have for math. (I first encountered him here). I both liked the strategies that he discussed and his argument that we have to treat students holistically and that we have to try to deal with some of their emotional baggage regarding math.

In the 2015-2016 academic year I was a fellow for Cornell's Center for Teaching Excellence. This program included approximately 4 meetings a semester, in which we asked questions of faculty that were expert teachers, discussed progress in preparation and reflected on presentations we were to do. Fellows take two courses, one in teaching and one in education research, as well as leading GET SET Workshops, TEPs, and informal discussions on teaching.

In addition to all of the information on teaching that I've gotten from participation in the various parts, I have also gained a lot from talking with teachers in other disciplines. Most of the math that I have seen has been taught in the same way, and so it was easy for me to think that this is what teaching is like in general. It was really eye-opening to learn about expectations for students and formats of courses in other disciplines.