Teaching Philosophy

My years of theater training have given me an advantage as a teacher: I am an actor, trained to engage and motivate groups. Using this ability, I focus on creating a culturally responsive classroom milieu [Brousseau, 1997 (I.6); Gay, 2000]. I believe learning is the process by which we construct connected, reflective understanding as individuals and as collectives. In my teaching I value the contributions students, colleagues, societies, communities, and policies can make to course content. I see my job as a teacher to include a responsibility to foster a classroom environment where it is safe to engage deeply with mathematical and pedagogical ideas; where students and I explore, disagree, and come to consensus while mastering standard forms and representations for concepts; and where each student can establish personal relevance for course material while constructing a profound understanding of mathematics.

My job as a teacher also includes a responsibility to encourage intellectual adventure, application of understanding, and self-regulation of learning and our associated actions. Self-regulation is a dynamic cycle of attending, reflecting, organizing, rehearsing, goal-setting, self-evaluating, and acting intentionally to complete a task [Schunk & Zimmerman, 1994]. Students build self-regulation skills, as individuals and as collectives, when they are required to attend to both the content and the learning of the content. Co-requisite with the ability to be reflective in self-regulation is the ability to be intentional. And, even though people can develop habits of generally being reflective and intentional, classroom and cultural context(s) may be significant perturbing factors in their self-regulations [Bandura, 1997].

In my teaching, self-regulation is encouraged through individual and group problem-solving and problem-posing activities, out-of-class homework, and individual and group projects. Exploration of ideas in real contexts means my students wrestle with in-class cooperative and collaborative activities as part of their engagement with mathematical tasks. Intellectual adventure, by definition, involves risking the exposure of ignorance as students work to make sense of, and build on, course content. I am a researcher in mathematics cognition, affect, and their interconnections, so theories of teaching and learning are woven into my practice. As a result, this presentation of my teaching practice includes reference to the experiential, empirical, and theoretical foundations upon which it has been built.