A Mentoring Program for Inquiry-Based Teaching in a College Geometry Class

Abstract

This paper describes a mentoring program designed to prepare novice instructors to teach a college geometry class using inquiry-based methods. The mentoring program was used in a medium-sized public university with approximately 12,000 undergraduate students and 1,500 graduate students. The authors worked together to implement a mentoring program for the first time. One author was an associate professor and experienced using inquiry-based learning. The other author was a graduate student in mathematics education. During the course of the year the graduate student first observed and then taught a college level inquiry-based geometry course for pre-service teachers. This article describes the details of this mentoring program and our reflections on how the program went.