Our cohort consists of three members: Chris Cary, Jessica Hoppe and Molly Coulter. Chris and Jessica are community college instructors at Spokane Falls Community College and Molly works at Dishman Hills High School, an alternative school in the West Valley School District of Spokane.
Jessica earned her BS in Mathematics at Saginaw Valley State University in 2009, her Masters of Initial Teaching at Gonzaga University with emphasis in secondary mathematics in 2010, and her MS in Mathematics at Eastern Washington University in 2013. She has been teaching at the community college since fall of 2013. Previously she taught at Eastern Washington University while doing her graduate work, and in Colville Washington at Panorama Alternative High School for a year prior to that. She is highly involved with classroom reform through a couple grant partnerships and several other faculty groups, with particular interests in inquiry based learning, number talks, incorporating “Menu” in college classrooms and backwards design. She is working to transition her classes away from textbooks and into more rigorous student investigation. She has been diligently trying to create a classroom where students are asking questions of one another and critiquing each other’s reasoning. Her role in the classroom has changed from a lecturer to a facilitator of classroom discourse.
Chris earned a BA is Secondary Math Education from Eastern Washington University in 1990, an MA in Teaching Mathematics from University of Idaho in 2005, and an MS in Mathematics from Eastern Washington University in 2013. Chris has been a full time classroom teacher for twenty-six years at the high school and community college level.
Molly earned BA in Physics at Carleton College in 1984. She earned her teaching certificate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks with an emphasis on math and science teaching. After teaching in a traditional high school setting and seeing too many students being unsuccessful in math, Molly earned her MEd in Special Education at the University of Alaska Anchorage where she focused on teaching math to students with learning disabilities. She taught math at the high school level for 16 years in Alaska, then moved to Spokane where she taught at Spokane Falls Community College for three years, and then moved to Dishman Hills High School for the last 6 years. Molly has been working to develop strong math reasoning skills, working on pattern recognition as a way to understand math concepts, and working with several grants to improve the ability of her students to move from high school and into college classes.
