Stepping Outside Your Comfort Zone

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.