Teaching Statement

Teaching mathematics and statistics at Edmonds College has been a challenging experience that has expanded my view of what education can be. My previous experiences as a community-college mathematics instructor showed me that, as an open-access institution, the community college plays a valuable role in the democratization of education. As such, the process of education should be collaborative, requiring dialogue among students to share and refine their conceptions, and also dialogue between teachers and students as equals to align the conceptions of the students with the scientific consensus. I entered Edmonds College prepared to challenge my students’ conceptions and help them to think critically. What I did not expect, is that the students and faculty of Edmonds College would challenge me to learn how to let students take control of the conversation in the classroom. After teaching for three years at Edmonds College, I am continuing to learn what it means to learn from your students and allow them agency in their learning. 

Every student comes into my classroom with an understanding of the world and their own conceptions about mathematics. Whether those ideas come from previous coursework or their own experiences, my task as an educator is to elicit my students’ understanding, show how they align with rules of mathematics, and guide my students toward a more valid understanding of the subject. This process requires dialogue among students, as well as between the students and me. An effective way of generating this dialogue is asking students questions about the concepts we are discussing in class and encouraging them to think about the answer for themselves, share their ideas with their fellow students, and then discuss their strategy and solution in a dialogue with me. This process requires students to support their own assertions and evaluate the statements of others in an open and respectful environment, which builds the critical-thinking skills of the students and fosters the sense that education is a collaborative enterprise. Research shows that this sort of constructive collaboration generates a sense of community that is vital to improving student self-efficacy and retention, particularly among underrepresented demographics in STEM. Allowing students to share their strategies and then refine the process collaboratively has proven to be a very effective technique in my classroom for helping my students learn complex ideas fluidly.

The faculty and staff of Edmonds College continue to challenge me to allow students to pursue their own interests in the classroom. With their encouragement and support, I have implemented several varieties of active learning in my classes that allow my students to become better learners. In my mathematics classes, students engage in problem-solving sessions where they present their solution and strategy on the whiteboard to the rest of the class. The students then walk around looking at the solutions presented by their peers and asking questions about their methodology. Students in my introductory statistics course (MATH& 146) are given the tools and support to collect and examine a data set of their choice. They are asked to come up with a set of research questions that they would like to answer using the data they are collecting and exploring. They then share their and conclusions with me and their peers. These classroom activities give students the chance to learn how to present and interpret data, and allow the students to show where they are on their journey toward becoming scientists and researchers. Engaging in this scientific process in an authentic way allows students to learn the process of collecting data and presenting data-driven results. This enculturation process will give students the confidence in themselves to persist when classes may get more difficult. These active-learning processes are also challenging for me as an instructor. Letting my students explore their own interests means that I receive questions from them that lead me to learn new things about topics I have not explored in the past. When my students ask a question that I do not immediately know the answer to, I can demonstrate how to construct new knowledge and make connections between what we have learned in class to the problem at hand. In this way, I can help students to not only learn mathematics and statistics, but also learn how to learn and how to integrate knowledge from the classes they take into a holistic mathematical understanding of the world. By allowing my students to take agency in their learning through these active learning projects, both my students and I continue to learn and grow.

The faculty, staff and administrators at Edmonds College fully support these active-learning techniques that improve student engagement, self-efficacy and persistence in the mathematics and statistics curriculum. I am truly thankful to all of them for supporting my development as an educator. I am also thankful for the enthusiasm displayed by the mathematics students at Edmonds College. In my experience, they are consistently excited to engage in these projects and that excitement is contagious to other students and myself. Ever since I started teaching at community colleges, it has been my goal to share my passion for mathematics with my students through collaborative dialogue. What Edmonds College has given me is the support to let the students take on an equal role in that conversation, which further democratizes their education in ways that are consistent with the community-college mission.