Regardless of these issues, as teachers our job is to find ways to make mathematics accessible to learn for all students and in a way that will serve them throughout their lives. Teachers and students, as well as parents, all play a part in the curriculum responsibilities so that students will meet the expectations, and more importantly understand the material. Students must bring a willingness to learn and teachers and parents should be their for guidance and encouragement through their process. Parents as well should be discussing the work with their child at home and becoming aware of the curriculum and expectations. They should communicate with their child about their progress and stimulate their interest in mathematics.
As teachers, we must develop appropriate instructional strategies that will help students achieve and develop appropriate methods for evaluation so that students are provided with numerous opportunities to be able to solve problems, reason mathematically, and relate their knowledge and skills to the world around them. We must teach our students to understand, not memorize and regurgitate things that do not make sense for them. Teach them that the answer is only a product and the solution is evaluating the whole thinking process itself. But also understanding ourselves that people can learn better when they are able to connect, and using human experience as a way for students to relate their knowledge and understanding to what makes sense in their world.
The curriculum outlines overall expectations and specific expectations, our five strands of content expectations (or our "big ideas") and our process expectations (problem solving, reasoning and proving, reflecting, selecting tool and computational strategies, connecting, representing, and communicating).
But as a teacher it is important to be able to use different instructional techniques in order to relay these expectations into the class room. Group activities are helpful and game techniques can be used in the classroom, students together are like investigators while teachers provide prompts and facilitate learning so that the students may draw conclusions on their own. For example the Handshake game on Friday's class, allowed us to get up and have social interaction by introducing each other (relative to real world experience) along with the "Think, Pair, Share" strategy allowed us to think on our own, share pair up with a partner to see if we had similar views and come up with conclusions to share with our group. Professor Mgombelo also facilitated our learning during our discussions with prompts so that we were able to collectively find the answer. I found this technique extremely effective for a student like me, who needs extra minds around when learning math and interactiveness, since I find it more complicated on my own. The picture below I found was a good basis for math literacy, to understand math we must know that it is grounded in problem solving, find the most efficient way to understand that problem, understand how we come to an answer, and relate it to personal experiences so that it becomes meaningful.
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| http://www.emsisd.com/Page/27599 |
Resources:
1. Ministry of Education, The Ontario Curriculum Grades 1-8: Mathematics, 2005. https://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/math18curr.pdf
2. Dr. Joyce Mgombelo. J/I Math Lecture 2 [In class lecture]. 2015 September 19.
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