By
Zachary Champagne, posted August 14, 2017 —
I have the pleasure of working with
and learning from groups of teachers from around the country. When I collaborate
with teachers in a professional development setting, I always begin the session
with this statement: “Kids have important mathematical ideas.”
It’s a starting point of sorts for
me. I like to communicate to teachers that this is the most fundamental belief
I have about the teaching and learning of mathematics. Every student that walks
into our classroom has important mathematical ideas. They are certainly not all
correct mathematical ideas, but they are important. They are so important that
I believe it’s our role as educators to find out what those important
mathematical ideas are and to make instructional decisions on the basis of what
we find out.
But how do we find out what those
ideas are? And what do we do when the conceptions that students hold aren’t
necessarily the ones that we desire them to have mathematically? I’ll attempt
to answer those two ideas separately.
First, we must find time and space to
talk (and much more important, to listen) to our students. If we can all agree
that each one of them has these important mathematical ideas, then we have to
find avenues to determine what those ideas are. Sometimes that can happen through
their written work, but more often, we should be listening to their responses
to carefully crafted tasks (both written and verbal) and making sense of what
those ideas are through conversation with each and every student. Let me be
clear, I respect the limitations that exist in a mathematics classroom and
one-on-one conversations. Therefore, I’m not suggesting that teachers should be
attempting to talk to each and every student in a one-on-one setting every day,
but I am hoping that we’ll try to do a whole more of that than we currently do.
Second, when students hold
conceptions about mathematics that don’t align with the conventions that we
want them to know, we should give them opportunities to challenge their
existing conceptions. We should provide space for them to make sense of these
ideas through intentional experiences with those mathematical ideas. Sure,
sometimes this takes some “teaching,” but more often than not, it takes each
student making sense of the mathematics on his or her own.
This short post certainly doesn’t have
the space to go into exactly what that looks like, but if you are interested,
you should check out Mike Flynn’s book Beyond Answers,
Tracy Zager’s book Becoming
the Math Teacher You Wish You’d Had, the Cognitively
Guided Instruction
series, NCTM’s recently published Taking
Action, Cathery Yeh’s Reimagining the
Mathematics Classroom
book, the CPALMS
Mathematics Formative Assessment System, and Skip Fennell, Beth Kobett, and Jonathan Wray’s Formative
5, to name just a
few.
I hope as you are thinking about this
new school year approaching, you will consider your role as a listener and
learner in the classroom. And to do this well, we must all start each day with
the understanding that each and every student we teach has important
mathematical ideas, and it’s our job to find out what those ideas are and to
help them make sense of them.
Zachary
Champagne is an assistant in research at the Florida Center for
Research in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (FCR-STEM) at
Florida State University. He previously taught for thirteen years as an
elementary school teacher with a specialization in math and science. During
this time, he received many state and national awards for excellence in
teaching, including the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and
Science Teaching (PAEMST), Duval County Teacher of the Year, and Finalist for
Macy’s Florida Teacher of the Year. He is the current president of the Florida
Council of Teachers of Mathematics (FCTM), and is currently interested in
learning how young students think about mathematics and how to help them
understand that mathematics makes sense. He tweets at @zakchamp.