What if I told you that lifeguards have a new way to teach toddlers to swim by throwing them into the deep end of a pool without supervision? Or will your grandmother's cookbook be thrown away because of its limited step-by-step approach to baking pies? Or that 16-year-olds should learn how to drive from their peers, or better yet, figure out how to drive themselves?
To most people, teaching young people skills in this way would seem foolish, counterproductive, and even disastrous. But educators across the country are adopting a similar “figure it out” approach to teaching math to students. A movement to teach mathematics in ways that run counter to research and common sense is increasingly sweeping school curricula.
work out
Often called discovery, experiential, or inquiry-based learning, this constructivist approach believes in student-centered learning where the teacher's role is minimal and students “regulate their own activities as they explore prompts.”
As a veteran teacher, I have been exposed to these different pedagogical approaches through numerous trainings and varied readings. Many teachers' colleges, curriculum publishers, and school leaders have been forcing this practice on teachers for years. However, in the past few years, this approach seems to have gained momentum in mathematics education like never before.
At the beginning of the school year, my school's math expert and former teacher introduced me to a new book called “Creating a Thinking Classroom in Mathematics” by Canadian math professor Peter Liljedahl. Although I was already skeptical about the trendy practices coming and going in education, after reading the 14 practices outlined in Liljedahl's book, I refused to participate in my school's math teacher's book club that would read the book and implement its ideas. As I did more research on this book and discussed it with educators on the left and right, I soon realized that the discovery learning practices it advocates were not a passing fad. This book has and will continue to spread widely throughout math classrooms.
The Building Thinking Classrooms movement is hard to escape among math educators. The Facebook page has 57,000 members, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a math department in the United States that hasn't been influenced by this page. At a recent conference for math teachers, I saw the presentation quoted again and again, heard speakers imploring the audience to buy it, and heard teachers from Texas to LA to New York reverently discuss it.
drawbacks of exercise
Most educators who promote Building Thinking Classrooms or other math pedagogies who advocate similar constructivist approaches, such as Jo Boaler, whose ideas formed the math framework recently adopted by the state of California, mean well. But similar to those who mistakenly believed in ineffective whole language and balanced literacy approaches to reading instruction, these math educators are embracing teaching methods that may feel good but may not be effective.
Common sense reasoning alone calls into question the merits of a philosophy of mathematics education that believes that homework should not be necessary, that students should be able to take notes of whatever they want, that practice should be done in standing groups, and that students should face each other rather than the teacher and be graded. I will raise it. We must take arbitrary measures, such as patience and cooperation. However, there is also a lot of evidence that contradicts the principles behind Building Thinking Classrooms and Jo Boaler's argument.
The 2006 paper provides the most comprehensive review of minimally guided instructional methods advocated in Building Thinking Classrooms. “There is no research body supporting this technology,” it concluded. And “not only is unsupervised training generally less effective; There is also evidence that there can be negative consequences when students acquire incorrect concepts or incomplete or disorganized knowledge.” A coalition of grassroots educators has debunked some of the method's most popular myths, explaining why ideas like productive struggle aren't effective and why timed math tests don't cause anxiety but actually help. Parents opposed this, arguing that classrooms would be noisy, math would be less enjoyable, students would not be learning from professionals (teachers) in the classroom, and parents would have to pay for tutoring to make up for lost learning. Critics have continued to point out the weak research behind such philosophies and explain why the philosophies themselves run counter to everything we know about cognitive science.
An alternative and direct approach
There's another math pedagogy you won't find posted on teachers' lounge walls or presented at recent educational conferences. Direct instruction is a method in which teachers explicitly and systematically instruct students through tasks such as step-by-step procedures, modeling, teacher-led practice, emphasis on foundational skills and fluency, and intentionally crafted lessons. Unlike the methods glamorized in Building Thinking Classrooms and Jo Boaler's articles, direct instruction is supported by evidence.
The largest educational experiment of all time, Project Follow Through was a 10-year research project pioneered by Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty that found that students in schools taught through direct instruction had overwhelmingly greater academic and social outcomes than students in schools. We concluded that there were emotional benefits. Uses a constructivist approach. Likewise, some of the greatest learning gains recorded in developing countries have occurred in Kenyan schools that have adopted direct teaching methods. Over the past 50 years, no training method has been as rigorously researched and evaluated as directional training. I passed the test successfully every time.
Despite the strong evidence supporting direct instruction, there are many critics in the education field. When the popular and effective “I do, we do, you do” teaching strategy was mentioned in a presentation I attended, the educator next to me scrawled “the doo doo method” in his notebook, expressing his aversion to modeling and guided practice. revealed. Typical techniques of direct instruction. Critics of direct instruction argue that it is too teacher-centric, takes creativity out of the classroom and prioritizes students learning passively at their desks and memorizing facts. Although most of these myths are untrue, they serve to hinder and prevent educators from learning and implementing the most research-based methods of teaching mathematics.
Critics of direct instruction have been all too successful in selling an alternative vision of mathematics education. If we allow their influence to continue to spread from classroom to classroom and school to school, we will be repeating the same mistake made years ago by well-meaning reading educators who abandoned phonics and left behind illiterate students.