Teaching
I primarily teach undergraduate and graduate courses in mathematics education. This semester, Spring 2009, I am teaching MATH 252, which is our second of three mathematics content courses for elementary school teachers. MATH 252 covers rational number concepts and operations as well as proportional reasoning. In the Fall of 2009, I will teach EDUC 806, which is the Proseminar for all incoming Ph.D. students in the School of Education at the University of Delaware. Also, I will teach EDUC 336 in the Fall of 2009, which is a middle school mathematics curriculum and methods course for the undergraduates in the Elementary Teacher Education program who are pursuing a concentration to be highly qualified to teach mathematics in the middle grades.
One of my teaching interests at the graduate level is the mathematical preparation of doctoral students in mathematics education. As a fellow with the Center for the Scholarship of School Mathematics located at the Education Development Center, I have been involved in a nation-wide network of faculty who develop courses designed to provide doctoral students with opportunities to engage in personally relevant mathematics and engage in a short term mathematics research project. The goals of these courses are focused on developing mathematical habits of mind and skills for posing their own questions about mathematics over developing particular mathematics content. The CSSM fellows also study the effects of these courses for the purposes of understanding doctoral student learning and improving the design of the courses. I have collaboarated locally with Dr. Alfinio Flores, my colleague in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Delaware, on our version of this course (Spring 2008). We presented about our work on this course at the NCTM research pre-session in 2009, along with faculty from other institutions who have taught similar courses.
At the undergraduate level at the University of Delaware, the course I have taught most frequently is EDUC 336, the curriculum and methods course specifically targeted to future middle school mathematics teachers that was mentioned above. My scholarship intersects with my teaching of this course. Generally, I am interested in how teachers learn to study the effects of their own teaching in order to improve it and learn from their own practice (Hiebert, Morris, Berk, & Jansen, 2007). I have conducted research on prospective teachers' reflective thinking skills in the context of the mathematics methods course for middle school teachers that I taught (Jansen & Spitzer, 2009). I have had the opportunity to work with a group of middle school mathematics teachers who are recent graduates of UD's elementary teacher education program (with a specialization in middle school mathematics) and learn about how they reflected upon their own practice. Additionally, I have taught mathematics methods for prospective elementary teachers as well as mathematics content courses for prospective elementary teachers.
In my previous career, I was a junior high mathematics teacher (grades seven through nine).
A list of courses I have taught previously is on my C.V.