Eastern Oregon University professor Andrew-David Bjork poses for a photo with his wife, Naomi, and two daughters, Elpoise and Isabelle.

LA GRANDE — An Eastern Oregon University professor recently took a sabbatical to Europe, not for a vacation away from work but rather to become a better teacher.

Andrew-David Bjork, a seasoned theoretical mathematician at Eastern, recently returned from a sabbatical in Southwestern France where he focused on creating a deeper understanding of the effectiveness of various teaching methods. 

“My experience in France has helped me develop the vocabulary and the theory behind practices I had employed before my trip,” he said. “The biggest change in me was how energized I was upon returning from France.”

Going on sabbatical

Three years ago, Bjork was awarded a sabbatical leave from Eastern, but due to the travel restrictions from the COVID-19 pandemic, the actual research was postponed by one year. While the study was intended to be completed in 2021, it ended up happening in 2022. 

Bjork went to Southern France and collaborated with a research teacher at the University of Bordeaux, who welcomed and hosted him during his stay. They collaborated with a few other researchers in southwestern France during the sabbatical. 

“The reason I wanted this sabbatical is up until now, really up until maybe 10 years ago, I knew how I wanted to teach,” he said. “I knew the type of methodologies I wanted to see in my classroom. I wanted a Socratic classroom. I wanted my students to be the ones discovering the knowledge, not just mimicking what I was doing.”

Teaching approaches

Ten years ago, Bjork discovered a particular teaching strategy called injury-based learning, which helped him achieve several successful outcomes in his classroom. 

Inquiry-based learning is a different way of approaching the classroom experience. Instead of having the teacher as the holder of all the knowledge and the one declaring what is right and what is wrong, the teacher provides problems that are tailored to the abilities of the students, designed in such a way that the students explore, offer creative solutions and end up creating the results that would be otherwise just declared as true in a lecture. 

Through this teaching method, the teacher becomes a guide and explores alongside their students. 

However, the more Bjork learned about this method, the more he started to realize he didn’t understand why the strategy itself was successful. 

“I couldn’t necessarily know how to design activities in that school of thought while ensuring that the learning would happen and how to quantify how it would happen,” he said. “I was lacking foundation and there was a lack of methodology.” 

Upon deeper digging, Bjork found the French School of Math and began to study how the French teach and learn. His specific purpose for the sabbatical work in France was to learn those methodologies from the people who created it or who worked with him

“The person I ended up working with was an advisee of the person who created the theories that I’m learning how to use,” he said. “Right now, those methods are used all over the French-speaking academia, but they haven’t been translated very well to the English-speaking world, so part of what I wanted was to start bridging that gap.” 

Applying the methods

When reflecting on his time in France for the sabbatical, Bjork remembers explicitly the second day he was there. His mentor took him to observe a class he was teaching for future elementary teachers. 

The students were working on an activity where they had to take a quadrilateral shape posted on the wall, measure it with only rudimentary tools and their basic knowledge of geometry and then reproduce it on the pavement with just chalk. 

“They had to apply the methodology that I had been learning,” he said. “I learned the concepts, I’d understood the words, but I’ve never seen it lived out in a classroom with students genuinely engaged in the learning and see why that experience was valuable to them. That was just an absolute joy to see.” 

Following the sabbatical, Bjork was excited to return to Eastern Oregon and implement some of the strategies he learned during his time in France. His goal was to become a better teacher, understand and self analyze his practices and then share these methods to create better teachers for the next generations. 

“A lot of it is that we have to learn how to fail in ways that help us grow,” he said. “There’s no single streamlined path through which you become who you’re meant to be. You make yourself as you make mistakes, as you discover what you need to be doing and who you need to become.” 

Returning to Eastern Oregon 

After returning from France, Bjork noted one student in particular who was struggling with accepting the idea that there is no such thing as math people and non-math people. Bjork said the student was holding on to a fixed mindset. Halfway through the course, while in the midst of presenting an activity she wanted to avoid giving her future students due to her fixed mindset, she changed her mind. 

“She stopped mid-sentence and said, ‘Wait … I don’t believe that anymore. I think my students really need to explore and learn by making their own mistakes.’ I have never seen an epiphany happen in person before,” Bjork said. “The entire class was speechless, and I think this is a good example of the transformative power of the methods from the French school of didactique.”