Sunday, April 10, 2011

One of those moments

I learned a lot this week about a new way of looking at math education that has completely changed my ideas about how I want to teach math if I end up in that subject area. One major element of my social studies teaching philosophy has always been that I want my students to engage in critical thinking about the subject material every day in my classroom, but I had never even considered how that would occur in math. Through my own math experiences and my jobs in college working with math students, I have always experienced math as based on three principles: that math is about knowing and applying the correct procedure, that the teacher shows the students the solutions and then the students repeat the procedure, and that there is one definitive correct answer. All those assumptions were rocked when I learned about a student-centered math classroom, whose advocates argue that students learn math better by actually doing it, promoting a classroom where teachers do not tell students how to do math as if it is a fact to be memorized but rather encourage them to solve tasks that get them to engage in the process of creating knowledge about math. I was enthralled to discover that the principle that students remember better what they think about on higher levels of Bloom's Taxonomy could apply to math as well. If I end up teaching math, I will not have to cringe every time I tell my students that they "just have to memorize how to do it" because I have had a revelation that students will for sure remember math once they fully understand it. Since there not will be one ultimately correct way to solve a problem that the students either remember or don't, there will be no excuses for not trying to think about the problem because a student thinks they can't recall what the teacher wanted them to do.






Original Image: Math Class
http://www.flickr.com/photos/attercop311/3088780713/sizes/s/in/photostream/
By: attercop311

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1 comment:

  1. RachelDApril 20, 2011 at 6:51 AM

    I can totally relate to this post. I think it's easy to overlook how you can make subject areas outside of your concentration just as engaging and exciting. Math isn't my strong suit and is something I definitely can work on becoming passionate about for my students. We had also talked about this student focused method in my 402 for elementary students. I think especially at this age more and more teachers tell students the right and wrong way of students doing something without them being able to fully understand why. By allowing students to explore methods and their own thinking really lets them get a deeper understanding of the concept. I think it's a nontraditional way of approaching math but is something students should be given the opportunity to experience.

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