Thank you for reminding all of us to listen to our students. For them to become life long learners and problem solvers, they need to have the tools and the confidence to believe in themselves to be able to solve different problems that they will be faced with as adults.
What a powerful article. You have slowed yourself down in your own thinking and helped us understand the power of giving students time to just think. Also, the importance of a teachers role to connect with each student individually.
I appreciate the emphasis this teacher, Mark, places on (a) listening to his students as they talk to each other and (b) looking carefully at the work they’ve done before beginning to respond to students’ questions. I remain curious about how the issues presented by new language learning are playing into the learning&teaching. The children in my school all come from homes where Kriol is the language; few of them speak English outside of the classroom. We want to work on ways to help students think about mathematics in their home language as well as their “school language,” even though we teach and present problem situations in English. I wonder if Mark or others have found ways to do that. I’ll be reading as you continue!
I agree with the previous comments on the importance of listening to learners as they engage in math. It is also interesting (and I think important) that Mark reduced the number of tests his students were taking believing that “…to be at school to learn, not to perform” is worthy of reinforcing. Wow!
I find it interesting that Textbook structured curriculum is not unique to the U.S. While many of those textbooks chapters are intelligently sequenced for content purposes, it is thought-provoking to think of other reasons to sequence units, as with the language acquisition noted here.
Thank you for reminding all of us to listen to our students. For them to become life long learners and problem solvers, they need to have the tools and the confidence to believe in themselves to be able to solve different problems that they will be faced with as adults.
What a powerful article. You have slowed yourself down in your own thinking and helped us understand the power of giving students time to just think. Also, the importance of a teachers role to connect with each student individually.
I appreciate the emphasis this teacher, Mark, places on (a) listening to his students as they talk to each other and (b) looking carefully at the work they’ve done before beginning to respond to students’ questions. I remain curious about how the issues presented by new language learning are playing into the learning&teaching. The children in my school all come from homes where Kriol is the language; few of them speak English outside of the classroom. We want to work on ways to help students think about mathematics in their home language as well as their “school language,” even though we teach and present problem situations in English. I wonder if Mark or others have found ways to do that. I’ll be reading as you continue!
I agree with the previous comments on the importance of listening to learners as they engage in math. It is also interesting (and I think important) that Mark reduced the number of tests his students were taking believing that “…to be at school to learn, not to perform” is worthy of reinforcing. Wow!
I find it interesting that Textbook structured curriculum is not unique to the U.S. While many of those textbooks chapters are intelligently sequenced for content purposes, it is thought-provoking to think of other reasons to sequence units, as with the language acquisition noted here.