We report on a qualitative investigation of the ways in which 14 faculty members in the mathematics department at a community college described their approaches to teaching and contrasted those with analyses of their mathematics lessons. We characterized instructors’ teaching approaches as traditional, meaning-making, or student-support and classified framing talk and mathematical questioning in the classroom. We found an association between instructors’ descriptions of their approaches to teaching and their enactment in the classroom through framing talk but no association between these approaches and instructors’ use of novel mathematical questions. Categorizations of teaching approaches that include classroom data to describe the interactions between students, content, and instruction can provide actionable information to influence teaching practice in higher education.
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