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This chapter focuses on accessible active learning (AL) strategies that promote equitable and effective student-centered instruction for higher education. Although there is not a consensus definition of AL across disciplines, principles of AL include attention to student engagement with content, peer-to-peer interactions, instructor uses of student thinking, and instructor attention to equity. A variety of AL strategies vary in complexity, time, and resources, and instructors can build up repertoires of such teaching practices. The field needs cultural change that moves away from lecture and toward AL and student engagement as the norm for equitable and effective teaching. Although such cultural change needs to include instructor professional learning about AL strategies, it also needs attention to collective beliefs, power dynamics, and structures that support (or inhibit) equitable AL implementation. This chapter provides frameworks for sustainable change to using AL in higher education, as well as research-based findings around which AL strategies are easy on-ramps for novice instructors. This chapter also provides a few specific examples of structures that support AL—course coordination and peer mentoring—and provides questions one may pose in attempting to spur cultural change that centers AL. 

In this poster we illustrate how stewardship, a particular kind of leadership, in the complex system of mathematics instructional development requires decentering and interconnecting. This theory development for professional growth of faculty agents for change expands on earlier work describing how instructional practices used by providers of teaching-focused professional development in seminars about teaching (for graduate students) could be beneficial both for learning high-powered approaches to teaching of undergraduate mathematics and for building a foundation for future change-agent work. Here we move one level up and present an analogous argument about practices for stewards who are teaching about teaching about teaching. The poster illustrates the multilevel system with an expanded model that incorporates learning objectives for provider professional learning and the instructional practices of such professional learning in ways that showcase (and teach about) decentering and interconnecting. 

Teaching professional development (TPD) in collegiate mathematics has expanded over the last few decades. Providers of TPD, people who organize and facilitate professional learning about teaching, are at the center of this growth. Yet, little is known about who Providers are and what they do. To better understand the national landscape of Providers of TPD within university mathematics departments, this report shares data from a national survey where respondents were Providers. The focus here is on findings from survey questions asking about characteristics of Providers and the “providees” with whom they work, along with formats, topics, and activities used in TPD. Results suggest that Providers value active, learner-centered instructional methods promoted by research and policy. However, in the TPD itself, formats, topics, and activities commonly used by Providers may preach but not regularly practice activity-based methods. 

Those who lead the preparation and assessment of novice college mathematics instructors for teaching (Providers) do their work in many ways (e.g., course coordination, seminars,workshops). Using data from a large national survey, this study examined reporting among 95 Providers about the structures of their departments, their goals for the professional development work they do, and their relative valuation among goals. Respondents completed a sorting and ranking activity about professional development goals and answered an open-ended question describing their sorting decisions. Qualitative coding identified six main themes for the respondents’ 285 descriptions. Quantitative analysis used the rankings of goals within respondents’ sorting categories to examine how Providers describe and value professional development goals related to professional community, classroom and department culture, and instructor response to students within their classrooms. 

Making progress in justice, equity, and diversity in post-secondary teaching and learning requires systemic change. The development of novice instructor professional knowledge is a critical subsystem of the undergraduate mathematics education system. Novices play key roles in instruction and have the potential to play key roles in change efforts later in their careers. Yet,there is little in the way of theory to support research and development in this area. In other fields, professional development that engages novices in building skill at self-sustaining, generative change as professionals is the ground in which agency for change is seeded and nurtured. We describe two dimensions of professional skills for interacting with ideas and people: decentering and interconnecting. In this report, we explore and illustrate the role of these dimensions in professional development for novice college mathematics instructors.