Introduction

Like many college professors, I was given a class to teach long before I actually knew what it really meant to teach. It was the Spring semester of 2015 and I was very excited to have two sections of Pre Calculus, a class that I have always credited for my own success in Mathematics. I had the obligatory meeting with the course coordinator who handed me a sample exam, a list of homework problems to assign, and told me "good luck" before I was set to teach two sections which had approximately 40 students each. Fortunately, the same thing happened to 4 other graduate students and we cleaved together in hopes that we could help each other through this new experience. The semester was a learning experience, we all banded together; sharing ideas about lesson plans and examinations and strategies for managing the classroom.

Overall, it was a success and by the time that a more attentive coordinator was appointed (after about two semesters) we had developed a culture of collaboration and experience with the course that left the coordinator with little to do. This was a highly formative experience for me and illustrated the power of collaboration that I tried to duplicate, often without success, throughout my teaching career.

Collaboration in the classroom

For most of my teaching career, I have adopted a romantic notion of what it means to be a college professor. A Google Image Search for the word "Professor" is shown below:

I had this picture of the tweed jacket, grey haired, and wise gatekeeper of truth. That a professor stood in front of a large lecture hall and inspired students by their words alone. And while I knew that my role as a teacher in the community college system was slightly different than a professor at Harvard, I still believed that student learning was entirely dependent on my ability to explain things effectively. Now this ability is important for a teacher to have, but in placing so much emphasis on this top-down model of learning, I was ignoring how I had learned mathematics. I hadn't learned mathematics in the course's lectures, as much as I enjoyed them, but rather I had really learned mathematics in the discussions that I had outside of the classroom. The discussions with professors, the discussions with my peers taking the class, the internal discussions that I had with myself when I was struggling with the course. The lectures could focus my thoughts and answer some questions, but they weren't the place where I had truly digested the material.

So I started wondering about how to stimulate this sort of conversation amongst my students. Like many, I began by telling my students to collaborate. Telling them to work in study groups, telling them to ask questions. Telling them to not just accept the material as presented, but to explore their understanding through conversation with their peers. This top-down method had the expected results, as you will hear from the countless professors who complain about their students.

It was at this moment that I was introduced to the Pre-Statistic course at Canada College. Or rather, I was recruited to teach a section. The Pre-statistics course at Canada College was developed as a group-based inquiry based learning. Where the learning was done in groups through the completion of specific activities and not though the systematic "explanation" of concepts and tools before their application. What I saw when I first read the activities provided for the course were deep analyses and comparisons that went beyond what I would have even been expecting from my Statistics course. All these analyses were expected to be done without many of the mathematical tools that I would have relied on in Statistics. I worried about how I would "teach" these students all of these ideas. That if I couldn't pre-digest the material for them, as I have done in the past, they wouldn't have any chance to successfully complete these activities. As I worked through the material the first semester I fell back on old habits. I would spend early parts of the class "lecturing" to the students. But even with me sabotaging certain parts of the curriculum, I noticed that students were able to work through concepts that I didn't expect and that the less that I "taught" the more that the students actually thought about material. (they tended to just parrot terms when I would lecture) This experience was a paradigm shift for me. It changed how I thought about the role of being a teacher. That by taking so much responsibility for laying out how to think about the material that I was robbing students of the opportunity to do it themselves. As much as it seemed different from my experience, I experienced a mostly lecture based college experience, I noticed how the conversations mirrored the process that I was using outside of class. This was a revelation for me and I have sought to implement collaborative and inquiry based learning techniques where ever I can.

Collaboration as Faculty Development

When I left my graduate program and started teaching on my own, I had unfortunately lost must of the community that I had developed in those years. As a new adjunct I was teaching mostly night classes which meant that I arrived on campus long after most of the other faculty members had already left. So like many new instructors, I took on the process of learning how to "teach" on my own. Faculty contact and peer observation was only done in the context of making sure that I was meeting the expectations of my employment. As you can imagine, this isn't necessarily an environment that is conducive to collaborative growth.
Starting in Summer of 2016, Michael Hoffman and Denise Hum introduced me to the idea of a lesson study. A lesson study is a process where instructors meet together and create a lesson plan with intention. There is a deliberate identification of learning goals and potential problems that you believe that students will run across. Then one of the professors execute the lesson while the other professors observe and record students progress through the lesson. They observe and record the responses and struggles that students have. The lesson is then concluded with a formative assessment that measures the progress that students made in the lesson. The assessment and the information collected from the students is then used to make changes and improvements to the lesson for the future. I had my pre-conceptions of my students thinking that was informed by conversations, but Denise and Michael were able to hear things that I had missed. And were able to see answers, attempts and discussions that I missed. (I am only one person) From this I was able to see that the misconception that many were making wasn't what I thought it was, and it has influenced how I teach the material from then on.
As a follow up to this trial lesson study, for which I was a willing guinea pig, we formed the Pre-Statistics community of practice. A weekly meeting group, where all of the professors who teach our pre-statistics course collaborate on the development of lesson plans, materials, activities, and teaching strategies. This community has not only helped the experienced teachers, but has allowed for us to quickly bring on board new faculty into our pre-statistics program without expensive training. I had found the community that I had early on, but this was even better. It was a mixture of experience levels and expertiese that was even more effective than the "blind leading the blind" that I had in graduate school.

Conclusion

In conclusion, a common thread that has existed between my success in both learning and teaching is the act of collaboration and community development. My experiences with pre-statistics and the community of practice will hopefully help me create a similar environment around the Statistics course at our college. Which has grown tremendously over my time here, but suffers from much of the same problems as our algebra sequence once did. My hope is that we can collaboratively work to make the statistics pathway the best that it can possibly be.