Zelha Pekkan

Zelha was born to a family of teachers. She graduated from Middle East Technical University in 2000, received M.S. degree from Indiana University in 2002 and PhD degree in Mathematics Education from University of Georgia in 2008. For her post-doctoral studies, she worked in an interdisciplinary project for teaching fractions with computational tools at Carnegie Mellon University. After offering undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Pittsburgh, she taught one full year high school mathematics in İstanbul. Later, she worked as a faculty member at Yeditepe University and directed research projects on school-university partnerships. In 2013 she conducted research and taught graduate courses at the University of Pittsburgh. Since 2014, she has been working as the Chair of the Department and teaching middle school mathematics at a public school. She is leading the pioneering research team in Turkey, namely MEF Mathematics Teacher Education Team that develops teacher training models through partnership between Education Faculties and K-12 Schools. She also holds the position of Associate Dean for the Faculty of Education at MEF University. Research Interests: Constructivism, children’s mathematical thinking, fractional knowledge, pre- and in-service teacher education, action research, university-school partnerships, flipped classroom methods. She received Science Academy’s Young Scientist Awards Program (BAGEP 2018) in educational sciences field.

This certification program reminded her that she should focus on developing new strategies/approaches to Flipped learning in teacher education. She wants to train future teachers who will use flipped learning especially in their own teaching. Therefore, changing K-12 classroom teaching will be possible.