Jeff Wanko

Education

Ph.D. Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, 2000 | Program: Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy

M.A.T. MIAMI UNIVERSITY, Oxford, OH, 1993 | Major: Mathematics ;

B.S. MIAMI UNIVERSITY, Oxford, OH, 1988 | Major: Secondary Mathematics

Biography

Dr. Wanko started as a middle school mathematics teacher and has such great memories of those six years as a school teacher. Some of the materials that he loved using in his classroom had been developed at Michigan State and those authors had just been awarded a large NSF curriculum development grant to expand those materials in a full middle school curriculum. Dr. Wanko decided to move to the Lansing area and start his PhD studies at Michigan State where he got to work on the development of the Connected Mathematics textbook series. These opportunities helped him to meet some amazing teachers and researchers from around the country and he has delivered many workshops in support of these materials. He graduated and got a job as an assistant professor at his undergraduate alma mater, Miami University.

Dr. Wanko worked at Miami for 25 years where he taught pedagogy and content courses for preservice and in-service mathematics teachers. He also got to take his family to Europe three times—first as a supervisor of Miami student teachers in US Department of Defense Schools across Germany, and then twice on a teaching assignment at Miami’s campus in Luxembourg. He also had nine years of administrative assignments—first as an associate dean, then as a department chair, and finally as an associate provost.

Dr. Wanko began looking for other work opportunities and the dean position at Bradley looked like a great fit. He is excited to be here, working in the College of Education and Health Sciences supporting our students and faculty.

Teaching

Dr. Wanko has developed and taught over twenty-five different undergraduate and graduate courses. A common through-line in his courses is active engagement—He believes that learning is deeply enhanced with hands-on collaborative experiences.

His favorite course that he has developed and taught was an honors seminar titled “Beyond Sudoku” in which students from all majors learned and developed solving strategies for various language-independent logic puzzles and then created examples of these puzzle types themselves. The idea was to focus on both the left-brain (logic) and right-brain (creativity) aspects of the puzzles. By the end of the course, students worked in teams to develop and design brand-new types of puzzle that had never been done before.

Scholarship

Wanko’s scholarship has focused around mathematical problem solving, the history of mathematics, geometry, and language-independent logic puzzles (like Sudoku). The majority of his recent work has been around using these puzzles to help learners develop their deductive and inductive reasoning skills. He has presented on this topic a number of times, including at the International Congress on Mathematics Education (ICME) in Hamburg, Germany and in Sydney, Australia.

Licensures & Certifications

Secondary Mathematics teaching license (Ohio)