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

We report findings from a qualitative investigation of how 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 into Traditional, Meaning Making, or Student Support and mathematical questions asked in lessons in terms of their complexity as either novel or routine. There is close alignment between how instructors describe their approaches to teaching and how they enact them in their classroom talk, but we found it difficult to differentiate instructors’ approaches when considering the complexity of the mathematical questions asked. Beyond attending to teaching approaches, increasing the complexity of questions that instructors ask might improve students’ opportunities to learn.National Science Foundation (award DRL 0745474). Portions of this work have been presented at the 14th Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education, Portland, OR, 2011, and Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, 2011.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/85214/1/MesaCelisLande_2011_DeepBluePost.pd