By:
Steven Boyce, Portland State University
Michael Ion, University of Michigan
Yvonne Lai, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Kevin McLeod, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Laura Pyzdrowski, West Virginia University
Ruthmae Sears, University of South Florida
Julia St. Goar, Merrimack College

All authors contributed equally to the preparation of the document.

How do students typically engage with new definitions in undergraduate mathematics classes? Are students provided with a definition, and then instructors help students make sense of it? Do students have opportunities to create their own definitions? Often when instructors choose to involve students in the process of creating a definition, the role of the instructor may be to encourage students to structure or word their definitions in a particular way, with the goal of leading students toward a definition found in a textbook. This can be a daunting task. After all, enacting this kind of lesson means anticipating what students may do or say, deciding when to let students keep talking and when to interject, and responding to unexpected contributions. Designing a lesson that is mathematically substantive but also provides opportunities for students to do a lot of the talking (including students providing feedback to other students) is really hard! Even with the most well-laid plans, surprises can still happen.

One way to take on this challenge, and have support as the unexpected arises, is to collaborate with other instructors. The authors of the post are all instructors of geometry courses for prospective high school teachers, who participate in a “GeT: a Pencil” community meeting every other week, and sometimes more often. These community meetings gather university geometry instructors from across the country to collaborate on issues related to the teaching of the geometry course primarily taken by preservice teachers. Among us are mathematics and education faculty, whose academic backgrounds range from mathematical physics to difference equations to hyperbolic geometry to student cognition to teacher education. We saw a pandemic-era opportunity to co-plan and co-teach a common lesson. On Zoom, we can be more than 3000 miles away and learn from each other in the same room. While practices involving the design of lessons (such as the Japanese “lesson study”) have been established for decades in some K-12 settings, it is still rather rare in undergraduate settings, though there are some exceptions.

In this post, we share our experience of developing a lesson that could be taught in any of our courses and how this lesson did not go according to plan. We intended the lesson to focus on creating a new definition. Although the class did not reach a consensus on a definition, the process opened many mathematical questions.

We first show the key example of the concept to be defined. Then we describe why we chose to use this example, how we built a lesson around it, and the unexpected outcomes. Finally, we discuss what we learned (and hope to continue to learn) about collaborative planning and teaching.
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