Title: (1) Associate Professor in Mathematics; (2) Independent Subject Matter Expert and Consultant
Company: (1) Chattanooga State Community College
Location: Chattanooga, Tennessee, United States
April China Crenshaw, Subject Matter Expert, Independent Consultant and Associate Professor in Mathematics at Chattanooga State Community College, has been recognized by Marquis Who’s Who Top Educators for dedication, innovative teaching strategies, and leadership in mathematics education.
Since 2006, April Crenshaw has excelled as an associate professor in mathematics at Chattanooga State Community College. Complementing this role, she has found success collaborating as a mathematics subject matter expert for various consulting companies, using summers to develop instructional content for charter schools in the southeast. In Summer 2023, she founded her own academic consulting company in Tennessee.
Equipped with an impressive pedigree, Professor Crenshaw earned her Bachelor of Science in mathematics from Spelman College and her Master of Science in financial mathematics from Florida State University. Currently she is one year away from completing her doctorate in organizational leadership from Vanderbilt University. From 2004 to 2005, she garnered experience as a mathematics teacher for Twiggs County High School, where she was honored as Teacher of the Year as a first-year teacher. From 2005 to 2006, she taught mathematics and test preparation for the Georgia High School Graduation Test (discontinued) at Rutland High School. Professor Crenshaw is certified in effective teaching and instruction through both the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) and Lumen Learning and has obtained certification from the Project Management Institute for managing virtual teams. Professor Crenshaw is an alumna of Leadership Chattanooga.
In addition to her primary roles, April excels in her creative works. Since 2008, she has rotated her service as lead teacher for calculus, precalculus, and learning support courses in the Mathematics Department at Chattanooga State. In 2022, she and two colleagues were awarded a $45,000 grant to redesign Introductory Statistics, the largest general education mathematics course at Chattanooga State with an alarmingly low success rate, particularly for underrepresented minority students. April and her colleagues developed a new student-centered course using open educational resources (OER) for which the results were remarkable. Professor Crenshaw’s commitment to improve belonging, student engagement, and relevant content in the course led to success rates of 86% and 95% in her Spring 2023 and Fall 2023 courses, respectively. The overall success rate in the traditional introductory statistics courses during this same period was 61%.
Professor Crenshaw has shared these results along with her other work on fostering a culture of belonging and promoting student help-seeking at national conferences, including the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD), Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC), and The Teaching Professor. Additionally, she has written three publications as a guest blogger for McGraw-Hill Education, Hawkes Learning, and ACUE and has been featured as the Student of the Month in Vanderbilt’s Ed.D. Career Development Newsletter.
To acknowledge a few of her latest efforts to improve the teaching and learning experience for her students, AMATYC has honored Professor Crenshaw with the 2023 Teaching Excellence Award. April has been named a 2023 FSLN Shirley Offord Scholar and distinguished as a LUMENary with Lumen Learning. She has also received several nominations for the Pearson Excellence in Higher Education Award that will be announced in March 2024. Professor Crenshaw continues to look for new and exciting ways to impact mathematics education.
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