Dr. Vicki Jacobs serves as the Yopp Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Education in the Department of Teacher Education and Higher Education.
What is your educational background?
I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire where I was a psychology major. Then I did my master’s and Ph.D. in educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where much of my research and coursework focused on mathematics education, especially at the elementary school level.
Why did you choose to come to UNCG?
I was introduced to UNCG when I was a graduate student. George Bright and Nancy Vacc, who were faculty members at UNCG at that time, had a research collaboration with some of the people that I worked with at the University of Wisconsin.
I would say that I came to UNCG because of the emphasis on community-engaged scholarship. There were lots of interesting projects going on here, but what really stood out to me was how committed people were to being connected with the community. That’s something that has always been important to me.
What are your current research interests and what attracted you to those areas?
I am particularly fascinated by how young children think about mathematics because their ideas are powerful yet often very different from how adults think. Children come to school with lots of informal mathematical knowledge, and they approach problem-solving by making sense of situations and ideas. Sadly, sometimes that sensemaking sometimes disappears in later grades and it gets replaced with tricks and rote procedures.
When teachers really understand and capitalize on how children think about mathematics, children’s thinking becomes a really powerful pedagogical tool for supporting their learning. My research has generally involved two strands related to this idea.
One research strand is focused on children’s mathematical thinking, so I have investigated particular areas of mathematics and how children think about those concepts. My most recent project focused on understanding children’s fraction thinking.
My other research strand is focused on collaborating with teachers to help them think about how they can use the research based on children’s mathematical thinking to improve their instruction. I have investigated how to support teachers both in growing their own mathematical knowledge and in transforming their classrooms into places that showcase and extend children’s ideas.
I became involved with this work when I was in graduate school through a research and professional development project called Cognitively Guided Instruction, or CGI. CGI is a long-standing project that was one of the first to take this approach of collaborating with teachers to focus on children’s mathematical thinking. I was inspired by what I saw.
For instance, I would go into classrooms where children were cheering for math time and teachers were asking for professional development. At a fundamental level, there was a joyful appreciation for engaging with mathematics. I developed a deep respect for both young children’s thinking and teachers’ expertise, and I met amazing educators, both at the university and in elementary schools.
Many of these educators are still good friends and collaborators today, and we are all part of a national CGI community, which regularly meets to share ideas and resources, and more generally celebrate the power of children’s mathematical thinking.
What are you hoping to accomplish with Your Research?
I hope to make mathematics classes places where children and teachers enjoy exploring mathematics and where sensemaking is valued. Multiple strategies are encouraged, and lessons are vibrant spaces full of mathematical talk. I think this vision of classrooms becomes a way of opening doors because, unfortunately, mathematics has sometimes been used as a gatekeeper that communicates to some children that they do not belong. While I do not expect, or even want, everyone to be a mathematician, I don’t want mathematics to be an obstacle for people in achieving their dreams. I want to leave those doors open and make sure that mathematics is viewed as a field where everyone belongs and can be successful. To accomplish these goals requires collaboration among researchers, teachers, and other educators.
How do students assist with your research?
I love to involve university students in my research. I collaborate mostly with doctoral students on my research projects. There are two main ways that they work on these projects with me. First, we work together on tasks related to my larger research projects and second, I try to help them carve out a smaller research project that is more their own.
In terms of their work on my larger projects, the specific tasks depend somewhat on what is occurring when they are in graduate school, but I try to give them as many research experiences as possible. So, they may help with planning, or data collection, or analysis, or writing and presenting, or all of the above.
They also have opportunities to get to know other faculty members and graduate students as my research projects are always collaborative and often involve multi-university collaborations. Access to other researchers and projects is important so that students can begin to make connections with the national, and even international, research community early on.
Beyond these research experiences on my larger projects, I work with students to help them define a smaller project in which they can take more of a leadership role. These smaller projects are often connected with one of my larger projects and vary depending on the student’s interests. For instance, a current graduate student has re-analyzed classroom video to better understand how teachers “launch,” or begin, problem-solving lessons. Another example is a former graduate student who just published a case study based on her three-year collaboration with an emerging teacher leader.
What do you enjoy outside of work?
I like to be outside, especially walking or hiking. I’m also a big fan of theater and I enjoy reading fiction. I particularly like to listen to audio books because they are like little theatrical productions. I enjoy traveling and experiencing new things, and I am lucky to have friends all over the country and find it fun to visit people in their spaces.
What advice would you give people who are CONSIDEring GOING into THIS FIELD OF Work?
I’m going to give the advice that someone gave me, which is to figure out what you are most passionate about and make the rest of it work around that passion. That advice has served me well. More specifically, when I first moved to California after graduate school, the first thing I did was volunteer in a K-1 classroom to get to know the local educational environment. I found that being grounded in classrooms and partnering with teachers on the day-to-day work was what energized me, and I built my career around these collaborations. What energizes you may be different, but once you can identify your passion, you can figure out how to connect your research, teaching, and service to it.
I would also say that you should not do this work alone. Find good collaborators, whether they’re at the university or out in the field. I have been incredibly fortunate with my collaborations, and my career would not have been anywhere near as productive or as enjoyable if I didn’t have these collaborators.
Finally, take advantage of opportunities. You never know when a small project that you do with someone is going to spark an interest in you or give you a great collaborator that you will want to work with for a long time.
If you were given $1 million to use on your research, what impact would that make?
I would get a group of collaborators together – both researchers and teachers. The money would give us the gift of time so that we could think together, work together, and engage together with children. The idea would be to deeply explore an area of mathematics teaching and learning, elevating how children’s ideas can be honored and extended.
The specific mathematical topic would depend on the interests of the group involved, but I’ll mention two areas that I currently find particularly intriguing. Young children love to count! So, if I was working in grades K–2, I would be interested in further understanding how young children learn to count and how counting can be used as a bridge to much more complex mathematics. If I was working in grades 3–5, I think I’m most intrigued with early fraction understanding. Fractions are typically such a hard topic for children to grasp, so I would be interested in exploring how to help children think about fractions as connected to their earlier number work rather than as a totally new topic.
In terms of impact, I would hope that we would make contributions in three main areas. First, we could make a local impact by improving the teaching and learning in the schools in which we would work. Second, we could support prospective and practicing teachers in North Carolina through not only what we learn but also the examples we would collect in the form of classroom video and children’s written work. These examples are extremely valuable resources for supporting the learning of teachers, but they take time and money to collect and carefully organize. Finally, we could contribute to the knowledge base in the broader research community of mathematics education.
