Bev, You hit on a number of key issues about learning and how teachers learn. I love your passion and I feel similar about the connection between all things--is this digression our own comprehension of teaching at work? Would we call these connections "distractions" to understanding or important on the path to understanding? I do not want to clog email boxes with dialogue that people do not want to hear, but I do want us to examine comprehension from the broader scope--which is exactly what Keene is pushing in her new book To Understand and what I think you are saying, Bev. (Jennifer, I will cross post this discussion and try to keep making the connection back to why I think this is comprehension, too).
Bev, your thoughts have the arrow--and then my responses do not: > I think there's a deeper problem here than not having "a teacher that really > knew math and >taught it so we would understand," and unfortunately it's a > problem for the entire preK-16 >profession, and we have little control over > it at our levels. I think we do have some control at our levels. And that control comes from wanting to continuously learn and grow (as people on this list do). That motivation helps, though it may not entirely fix the problem. Same as reading instruction--if we all stop our own depth of learning with what we learn in our pre-service classes, I think we are not going to make the best reading teachers. >People who teach math to the preK-5 or -8 take math "methods" in college which >in a perfect >world would prepare them to teach the little ones. It has been >my experience as I watch both >experienced and new teachers come with credit >on their transcript for teaching math methods, >that what they received was, >in fact, just another math content class. I both agree and respectfully disagree here. I think in some cases instructors revert back to math content because they can see (as I have seen) that what the student teachers think they know about math and what they actually need to understand to teach math well is quite disparate (is that the right word-choice?) While all those math processes: problem solving, articulation, inductive thinking, use of manipulatives...are useful and important to math instruction, without solid understanding of math content, teachers use these strategies at a weak level. It is like teaching reading with strategies and never actually knowing (as a teacher) about the complexities and multi-layers of a text. If your students discover literary devices, plot/character/setting manipulation, symbols, deeper themes, it will be by accident, unless you guide them in how to use strategies to get to the deeper levels. We have all probably seen strategy instruction that falls flat because it does not aim beyond the surface of the text. I think also, colleges have a very limited time with student teachers to prepare them for elementary math instruction--I cannot speak for all university programs, but the one where I teach offers the math methods course in one, 6 week shot. I cannot remake all of the math modeling these students have received in K-12 education in a single 6 week period. I tell pre-serivce teachers they must make the commitment to continuously grow and learn and not "settle" once they are placed in a room with 30 sparkling faces. They must realize that they DO NOT KNOW math and its instruction and that it is their job to relearn, relearn, and understand. Isn't it the same with reading? Could colleges provide better math methods? I suppose, but the best understanding comes once you are in the classroom--combining practice with your own learning. Longer time periods in pre-service instruction would probably not help. Unfortunately, many teachers get to the classroom and stop their learning with a cursory review of the text. If schools/districts do not promote excellent PD on math, and if teachers do not take up the gauntlet (because they realize they do not know), then math instruction is left to flounder. By flounder, I mean that students never discover the art of math, just the verbage and how-tos of it. And although students can make it through calculus on this thin grounding (I certainly did), they will not choose to learn the deeper concepts of math, ever. And then they teach others from that thin base and the cycle continues. If we break the cycle (as I suspect some Asian and some Netherland countries have done), then the modeling students receive as they learn math will help them to be excellent math teachers in the future. The Everyday Math program (promoted by NCTM) would be an attempt--I think--to break the cycle. I cannot say whether it will work, having no experience there. I am wondering if that is the goal of making the Calkins program required and paced in New York schools? > I'd like to think that a little of the "Mosaic movement" had its roots in the > NCTM Standards, the >first content standards. > And basically the same thing happened in math as happened to those following > >Kenneth >Goodman. He put books in kids hands and watched and listened to > what early readers >actually >do (which, of course, correlated dramatically > to excellent comprehenders) so that we >could do >for all what the few had > done for themselves. Absolutely, this is the relationship/connection that we all keep crossing over into, (and consequently why we keep accidentally starting "off topic" conversations on the mosaic list. We are interested in understanding how to teach understanding--and that is more than mosaic's strategies, and probably the reason Keene felt a need to write a new (quite fabulous) book. I have always thought reading was the gateway to learning everything (once, after becoming a reader I even dreamed I could learn EVERYTHING--until I saw the public library). But now I think it is something much deeper that reading CAN provide that is what I sought--and that is the process of seeking understanding. That is where learning occurs. Strategies give us some tools to aim for that, but as we all know there are different depths to understanding. We have to keep reusing the tools to aim deeper to really know about something. The same is true for understanding all areas of the content that we teach. > Enter Dubya. NCLB. Saxon. Accountability. High-stakes. Yes. Not aiming for depth there. I do believe that initially they were aiming for fairness and aiming for trying to create schools that gave all students opportunities. But they ended up aiming instead for the lowest common denominator (couldn't help but slip in a math metaphor), instead of raising our schools all to the highest possibility. > So--my apologies to Jennifer and you all for muddying the waters of on- and > off-topic once >again. And inserting politics. But...to me, it's all the > same issue. > > Is there anyone that thinks that visualizing, questioning, inferring, > etcetera isn't how we learn math? Now I will go back to my question on the previous email. Is math instruction the same as reading comprehension? Or are some subjects more linear/spiraling (like math and science) and other subjects more holistic (like reading comprehension and writing)? In math, you do need to understand what a fraction means before you can step up to relating the fraction to other things. Is this so in reading comprehension? Do we need to know how to do context clues before we can infer? Would a spiraling or linear curriculum make sense in reading? (Is that already how we do it and I am too much of a dolt to get it?) :)Bonita _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
