Teacher Education Group

This group of faculty is especially interested in the mathematics education of teachers. They have been active in designing, improving, and studying the effectiveness of courses that are either expressly for prospective teachers, or are taken by many prospective teachers. In these initiatives, mathematics faculty collaborate with faculty in the College of Education, and particularly the Department of Mathematics Education.

Ed Azoff
My involvement with teacher education includes:

• teaching preservice courses

for elementary school teachers: MATH 1700 (MAT 205, 206
under quarters)
for high school teachers: "transition" courses including linear algebra (3000),
sequences and series (3100), and introduction to proof (3200)
algebra (4000, 4010)
geometry (5200)
probability (5560)

• service on committees of graduate students in mathematics education
  
• informal discussions with other faculty members in this group and in
  mathematics education
  
• service on the statewide committee advising the Georgia Early
  Mathematics Placement Testing Program

Sybilla Beckmann
In the last few years I have been designing the mathematics courses for prospective elementary school teachers at UGA. We are phasing in a three-course mathematics sequence that is designed to work with two mathematics methods courses to give students the deep understanding of elementary mathematics they will need to teach mathematics well. I am writing a book for use in mathematics courses for prospective elementary teachers. It is due to be published by Addison-Wesley in about 2003. All of this is fascinating and satisfying work.

I plan to study the effectiveness of the mathematics courses and to revise and improve them continuously. Since teaching mathematics courses for prospective elementary school teachers has proven to be challenging for mathematics faculty, I hope to help my colleagues, and mathematics graduate students, learn to teach these courses well.

I am involved in several projects in which I interact regularly with faculty from the College of Education as well as classroom teachers and school children. One of these projects is GSTEP, the Georgia Systemic Teacher Education Project. I am also a member of the Deans' Forum, which is an invited group of faculty from the Colleges of Education and Arts & Sciences that discusses common concerns such as the scholarship of teaching and improving teacher education.

Elliot Gootman
I have been involved for a number of years in the design and teaching of mathematics courses for pre-service middle school teachers. I am currently developing a new algebra course for middle school teachers, Math 5035/7035. This course will be taught for the first time in the Fall of 2001, as part of the University System of Georgia Board of Regents' Teacher Preparation Initiative. One innovation of the course will be the required involvement of students with some aspect of the MathCounts competition.

Other education projects or groups I am involved with include:

• The Dean's Forum, a group of UGA faculty in Arts and Sciences
  and in Education, dedicated to the preparation of teachers.
  
• Project Keystone
  
• Project Intermath
  
• Contextual Teaching and Learning
  
• GSTEP

In addition, for the past two summers I have conducted a one-week long in-service workshop for teachers on the Mathematics and Physics of Simple Machines. This workshop was developed in collaboration with Dr. Lynn Bryan in the Department of Science Education, and was funded by a
grant from the Eisenhower Higher Education Program.

Clint McCrory
I received a 1999-2000 UGA Learning Technologies Grant for the development of the geometry sequence for future high school teachers. My students use the software Geometer's Sketchpad and Kaleidomania to do experiments in plane geometry and transformations. I am particularly interested in teaching the use of Geometer's Sketchpad as an aid to writing proofs. I'm a member of the High School Mathematics Curriculum Team of GSTEP, the Georgia Systemic Teacher Education Program.

Ted Shifrin
Although I pursued an academic career in mathematics because of a strong desire to be a force as a teacher, it is only recently that I've realized how large an influence talented and dedicated teachers really have on future teachers and hence on the future of our society. We are on one hand the models of what one should do in the "arena." But our influence can be more pervasive: I wrote my textbook Abstract Algebra: A Geometric Approach as a text for future secondary teachers, adopting an atypical
approach that I think is pedagogically preferable. I will continue to teach future teachers (primary and secondary) throughout my career at UGA.

Paul Wenston
Recently, I taught several new courses aimed at inservice Elementary and Middle School teachers. These courses have been aimed at teachers in a single county and have been taught off campus in classrooms in one of the local schools. These courses have been part of a project to increase the
mathematical and mathematical teaching skills of inservice teachers in Georgia.