As always, I feel like this semester has flown by. Part of it going by so fast is because it has been so busy. In February I was able to attend the Association of Math Teacher Educators conference in New Orleans. I presented some of my research with my colleagues Orly Buchbinder, University of New Hampshire, and Tuyin An, Georgia Southern University. I met them through the Geometry for Teachers (GeT) group, coordinated by the University of Michigan.
At the end of February, I was able to attend the Research in
Undergraduate Mathematics Education conference in Omaha. Several of us from the
GeT a Pencil community got there early and were able to gather and talk about
writing chapters in an upcoming book and the work that we have already done. As
a first-time attendee, I enjoyed the RUME conference, and I hope to go again
next year. Again, I co-presented with Orly and Tuyin about our FullProof
project. We had a lot more people in the audience, thanks to our GeT community.
The GeT community has made me grow so much as a researcher
and it has truly put me outside my comfort zone. I am doing quality math
education research, which I haven’t done a lot of before. It has been great for
me professionally, and I have met some amazing faculty from across the country
who have become my friends.
In the Math 371 course this semester, I put my students
outside their comfort zone in three assignments: the Desmos Activity Builder
project, the Desmos Art project, and the Learning Management System (LMS)
project. In the activity builder project, they had to figure out how to check students’
answers and card sorts, so they had to use the Desmos computational layer.
Usually, we could find the code by looking at someone else’s activity. In the
Desmos art project, they had to figure out how to graph piecewise functions,
shade the correct regions, and create sliders that did what they wanted. This
was challenging, but students helped each other a bit throughout the process so
that was good to see.
Since I had 5 students in Math 371, I couldn’t put them in
pairs to do the LMS project. Once I decided that I wanted each student to do it
individually I had to find an LMS for each of them that was free and somewhat
easy to use. I knew that I would have them use Google Classroom, Microsoft
Teams, and Canvas, so I needed two more. It was really hard to find two that
might work, but I ended up with Showbie Basic and EdApp. For this project, each
student had to create a class in the LMS and make sure that their classmates
were enrolled in the course. Then they had to pick a teaching topic from the 6
– 12 SD Probability & Statistics standards. Once they had a topic, they
created a video to teach the topic, and a homework assignment and quiz for
their classmates to take. Then each student must complete all of these for each
of their classmates. Once they are done, they write a paper about the LMS from
both the teacher’s and student’s perspective.
While these projects made the students a bit uncomfortable,
they said that they enjoyed them because they put them in the position of being
a teacher. As math teacher educators, we need to put preservice teachers in the
teacher role more than we currently do. Yes, it will make them uncomfortable,
but the process of being uncomfortable leads to growth. As we train future
teachers, we need to show them that you never stop learning or growing, and one
of the best ways to do this is to model it.
