I am constantly working to improve my teaching and I have short-term and long-term goals to do this.
The development and use of projects as open educational resources supports my two priorities of making education accessible and fostering students’ independence. In the short term, I plan to continue to develop short modules for math courses for STEM majors like the applications I have developed as an Opening Gateways faculty fellow and senior fellow and used in my MAT 1275 and 1375 classes. I love experimenting with projects in my classes and my seeing my students engage with them at a deep level, but I would like to become a true expert at their design and implementation. In the longer term, I would like to introduce these applications into the curriculum for these courses to ensure they are relevant and up-to-date for our students.
Also in the long term, I also see a similar redesign of MAT 1190 Quantitative Reasoning inspired by my work on the Quantitative Literacy subcommittee of the math department’s Assessment Committee. For that assessment, I worked with my colleagues to create a multi-day project based on compound interest and credit card debt. Other math department faculty have been receptive to the idea of designing similar modules for other topics and replacing the course with a sequence of these modules.
From a more abstract perspective, in the short term and in the long term, I plan to become an instructor who can better support all students. I make strong connections with many students every semester and I want to strengthen this skill to include more—especially harder-to-reach—students.
