Innovative Teaching Exchange - Information for Contributors

The purpose of the Innovative Teaching Exchange is to allow people teaching mathematics at the college level to share new methods they have tried, invented, or discovered, which they feel help the students learn better and/or more easily. The intention is to encourage more experimentation with more methods than the traditional lecture/questions method. Articles to be included in the Exchange should be method-oriented, not content-oriented. That is, a new proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus should be sent to The College Mathematics Journal or The American Mathematical Monthly, not the Exchange. A new activity for students to participate in, so that they come to an understanding of that theorem may be appropriate for the Exchange. On the other hand, a full-blown research article in mathematics education should be sent to Educational Studies in Mathematics, For the Learning of Mathematics, or another mathematics education research journal: for a full list, see the RUME website. The Exchange, rather, is looking for something faculty members can easily adapt to their own classrooms. It is assumed that contributors to this Exchange are interested in helping others try their methods, and are therefore happy to provide more details when asked.

Contributions (which may be Word documents, TeX files, or html files) should be no longer than 1000 words and should contain a detailed description of the method, adequate for readers to plan how to use it in their classrooms. It should include information on the size and level of course it has been tried in, and how well it has worked; what difficulties were encountered in using the method (especially ones that surprised the writer, and any difficulties with colleagues’ skepticism of the method) and suggestions for overcoming those problems. Affiliations and e-mail addresses of authors should be included so that those wanting more details, or having questions about the method, can correspond directly with the author.

Contributions should be sent electronically to the Editor of the Exchange, Bonnie Gold, at bgold@monmouth.edu.