March Articles

Professional Development Delivered Right to your Door
Teaching Children Mathematics

The authors of this article, Lynn Breyfogle and Barbara Spotts, write for an audience of pre-service and veteran teachers. For pre-service teachers, these tips and suggestions about professional development will become part of the routine, and for veteran teachers, the authors point out easy ways to incorporate it into an existing routine and emphasizes the importance of becoming a better teacher through some of the following things. They write that regular reflection on lessons, units, and assessments improves a teacher’s awareness of their strengths and weaknesses; they mention that collaborating with other teachers provides a team atmosphere with the common goal of teaching all students and creating the mentality of holding each other accountable for the success of their students. The creation of the “team” eliminates competition, and enhances balance between teacher’s strengths and weakness creating more stability for students among classes. Other avenues of professional development that one could do independently or as a team are reviewing professional articles, using teacher guides, create gallery walks with student’s work exhibited, conduct critiques, communicate and share with teachers a grade above and below yours and set one large and small goal for the year.
Professional Development is important at any stage of a teaching career and for every type of teacher. I am self-motivated and enjoy learning and through the strategies and activities presented in this article, I feel like I have the tools to effectively become a stronger teacher and help others become stronger too. Criticism is easy to dish out, but learning how to make it constructive so that it stays positive is really important. All of this information pertains to teachers of any content area, including math. Examples within the article describe teachers reflecting after lessons in math. They came to the conclusion that they need to leave more time for the students to come up with the answers after saying the problem, and how to ask interactive questions on a higher order of thinking and comprehension, instead of just yes or no.

Breyfogle, L, & Spotts, B. (2011, March). Professional development delivered right to your door. Teaching Children Mathematics, 17(7), Retrieved from http://nctm.org/eresources/view_media.asp?article_id=9648


Taiwanese Arithmetic and Algebra
Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School

The two female authors, Jane-Jane Lo and Feng-Chiu Tsai, dig into the culture of math academics in Taiwan. The information highlighted is valid because of the high success rate of students going through the Taiwan math curriculum. The main point of the article is the transition between arithmetic and algebra and three strategies students use when using arithmetic and algebra in problems. Taiwan middle school-aged students develop problem solving and reasoning abilities, deepen number and symbol sense and promote meaningful connections between arithmetic and algebraic reasoning. Their success comes from reading the problem carefully while thinking about different paths to solve it, and evaluating multiple solution paths of a given item, applying good number and symbol sense, before carrying out the computational steps. “By solving problems both arithmetically and algebraically, students not only develop in-depth understandings of quantitative relationships, but also discover the similarities and differences between arithmetic and algebraic approaches”. In summary, this article reviews the importance of connecting algebra with arithmetic to help students work through problems.
I think we can learn a lot from other cultures and their curriculum, especially from ones that have such a high success rate. If there are ways to use prior knowledge to assist in learning new knowledge there is no reason not to build upon it. I agree with this aspect of their curriculum but I don’t know if I agree with the huge pressure of the Basic Competency Test that evaluates their knowledge and places them in high school. As we have learned, standardized testing is not always an accurate way of assessing knowledge. Saying that, I think it is impressive that students seem to do so well on them, and I think that is directly proportional to their curriculum setup which we could borrow a few ideas from.

Lo, J, & Tsai, F. (2011, March). Taiwanese arithmetic and algebra. Mathematics in the Middle School, 16(7), Retrieved from http://www.nctm.org/eresources/view_media.asp?article_id=9621