Transforming Teaching in Mathematics with the COMMIT Network (COMmunity for Mathematics Inquiry in Teaching)

A regional COMmunity for Mathematics Inquiry in Teaching (COMMIT) is a local group of college mathematics educators interested in practicing and disseminating teaching and learning techniques centered on student inquiry. These communities aim to provide evidence-based support mechanisms, through professional development, mentoring, and collaborations, to help members sustainably transform their teaching. Each regional COMMIT is part of the growing COMMIT Network. This network brings together the leadership teams of all the communities under one loose structure. The COMMIT network is supported by an NSF grant (NSF-DUE #1925188) and consists of 10 communities with over 500 members total.

While student inquiry in the classroom is characterized by the 4 pillars of Inquiry-Based Mathematics Education, we can humanize and generalize these pillars to our work with faculty in the COMMITs:

1. Participants should engage teaching with inquiry deeply and experience it as a living discipline. That teaching with inquiry should be driven by questions that make sense and are valuable from participants' perspectives and should allow them to develop new insights and ideas. (transformative learning)
2. Participants should collaborate, developing their own authority and collective ownership of the teaching with inquiry, engaging their full selves and bodies and learning about themselves and their peers through these interactions.
3. Facilitators should leverage participants' thinking to broaden teaching with inquiry and deepen the community discourse.
4. Facilitators should attend to positioning each participant as a knower and person who is represented in teaching by inquiry and should actively resist historical and ongoing oppressive hierarchical systems.

The COMMIT toolkit provides resources to start and sustain a COMMIT, as well as information about the activities and events that COMMITs have done in the past. The poster will include questions to actively engage the audience in making sense of the 4 pillars and the COMMIT network.