Course Coordinator Orientations Toward their Work and Opportunities for Professional Development

One way that university mathematics departments across the United States are making efforts to improve their introductory mathematics courses is by implementing or increasing the level of course coordination. This can entail creating uniform course elements for multi-section courses and efforts to build a community of practice among the instructors teaching these courses. In this paper we explore coordinator orientations that implicitly (and in some cases explicitly) guide their work. In particular, we identified two orientations toward coordination, a Humanistic-Growth orientation and a Resource-Managerial orientation. Data analyzed in this manuscript consists of interviews with 19 course coordinators and 53 instructors from seven different higher education institutions across the United States. We introduce a framework that aligns two approaches to professional development with these two coordinator orientations and conclude with a discussion on how department chairs and others looking to implement or improve coordination may leverage this framework provided in this paper.