Teaching Philosophy
Rebeca A. Cooper, Ed.D.
Assistant Professor
Dr. Cooper teaches from a scholar-practitioner perspective, shaped by two decades in Texas public schools as a teacher, principal, and assistant superintendent before she entered higher education. Within that frame, she teaches statistics as a language rather than as a set of computations. Most doctoral students arrive convinced they are bad at math, when what they actually lack is vocabulary. They cannot yet name what they are looking at, so every methodological decision feels arbitrary. Her approach begins by giving students that vocabulary and a framework for aligning a research question with an appropriate design, so that selecting a statistical test becomes a matter of reading the question carefully rather than guessing. When a student can articulate why a question calls for a comparison of means rather than a test of association, the computation stops being the hard part. This framework is the subject of her recent book chapter, and it shapes every methods course she teaches.
Her students are working principals, superintendents, and district leaders who need research to inform decisions they are making this week, and that shapes how she structures a course. She builds around application rather than abstraction, using real data sets and authentic problems drawn from school and district practice, because methods learned in the abstract rarely survive contact with a live problem. Theory earns its place in her classroom when it explains something a leader is actually facing. She designs for transfer, because a student who can run an analysis but cannot explain it to a school board has not finished learning it. She treats feedback as instruction rather than evaluation, returning substantive comments quickly enough that students can act on them while the work is still in motion. She also builds courses to be navigable, with clear schedules, predictable structures, and synchronous office hours, because adults balancing full-time leadership roles with doctoral study should spend their energy on the content rather than on deciphering the course. Her aim is that students leave not only able to complete a dissertation, but able to use evidence honestly in the decisions they make on behalf of students.
Her students are working principals, superintendents, and district leaders who need research to inform decisions they are making this week, and that shapes how she structures a course. She builds around application rather than abstraction, using real data sets and authentic problems drawn from school and district practice, because methods learned in the abstract rarely survive contact with a live problem. Theory earns its place in her classroom when it explains something a leader is actually facing. She designs for transfer, because a student who can run an analysis but cannot explain it to a school board has not finished learning it. She treats feedback as instruction rather than evaluation, returning substantive comments quickly enough that students can act on them while the work is still in motion. She also builds courses to be navigable, with clear schedules, predictable structures, and synchronous office hours, because adults balancing full-time leadership roles with doctoral study should spend their energy on the content rather than on deciphering the course. Her aim is that students leave not only able to complete a dissertation, but able to use evidence honestly in the decisions they make on behalf of students.