Teaching Approaches of Community College Mathematics Faculty: Do They Relate to Classroom Practices?

We report on a qualitative investigation of the ways in which 14 faculty members in the mathematics department at a community college described their approaches to teaching and contrasted those with analyses of their mathematics lessons. We characterized instructors ’ teaching approaches as traditional, meaning-making, or student-support and classified framing talk and mathematical questioning in the classroom. We found an associa-tion between instructors ’ descriptions of their approaches to teaching and their enactment in the classroom through framing talk but no association between these approaches and instructors ’ use of novel mathematical ques-tions. Categorizations of teaching approaches that include classroom data to describe the interactions between students, content, and instruction can pro-vide actionable information to influence teaching practice in higher education