Chapter 1

Introduction to Teaching Mathematics in Higher Education

The purpose of this book is to provide you with an introduction to teaching mathematics that will meet your immediate needs in your first years of teaching and also lay the foundation for scholarly development as a professional teacher. Of course, just reading about teaching won’t prepare you for actually doing it, so it is assumed that your training will also include contact with instructors, mentors, experienced colleagues, as well as practical experience of teaching. This book will hopefully prepare you to ask the right questions of those around you. Specifically, our objectives are to:

 help prepare you for your initial teaching duties

 provide a foundation on which to build your professional development in teaching and learning as you progress through your academic career

 raise questions in your mind that will encourage you to think deeply about teaching and learning

 alert you to the importance of teaching and the difficulties involved in effective teaching.

In these materials we have in mind a particular audience. We are assuming our readers are essentially new to teaching, but will probably go on to have a lifetime career involving teaching. We therefore present the subject as merely a beginning or foundation, on which to build in your future development as a teacher. In this respect, even though you might just be starting out, you will certainly be facing many challenges and an environment that your more experienced colleagues may not have been used to. The HE teaching profession is changing, and with advances in neuroscience, psychology and mathematical education it is likely that teaching and learning will become a much more scientific subject - emerging from the artisan/craftsman era that has largely characterized it up to now. Teaching will perhaps become more of an ‘applied theory of learning’. While we cannot all become experts in pedagogic theory in order to teach, we can be alert to its implications and sympathetic to its objectives and sufficiently open minded to adopt well founded principles of the theory. So, in this book we will summarise the current thinking about how students learn mathematics, so that you can incorporate this in developing your teaching. We will encapsulate the main ideas in a number of basic principles (See Section 1.6) with which few teachers would disagree, and which are supported by evidence and experience. These principles will underpin this book which is aimed primarily at practice ‘at the chalk face.’

The rest of the chapter can be accessed here.

Additional supporting material, not avalilable in the book, can be found by using the links below.