Joined-Up Teachers is part 3 of Rob Eastaway’s excellent three part essay on maths and teaching (which we featured earlier in the year), and it’s now online.
Joined-Up Teachers looks at the fact that there are many different types of maths teacher, and many of them, maybe even tens of millions (if you count all the adults in positions to influence students’ maths education).
Despite the universal application of Maths, there is little joined-up thinking in maths teaching:
In an ideal world, the instruction across these millions of teachers would be smoothly joined up, but we all know that this is far from the case. Many parents are at odds with the maths their children bring home from school (“that’s not how we did it in my dayâ€).
Worse, there are many homes that are anti-maths. Negative messages from parents who tell children that they were always hopeless at maths themselves (and “it hasn’t done them any harmâ€) undermine much of what school teachers are trying to achieve.
Rob wonders how many primary teachers see their secondary counterparts in acton, or vice-versa. Similarly, how many teachers of difficult, low-achievement classes get to see how teachers of attentive, high-achieving students work, and vice-versa?
Eastaway implies that we must think of all these varied maths teachers, from lay to professional, as lying on a continuum, a ‘spectrum’. The home environment is as much a place of maths learning as is the university lecture hall, and everyone on that spectrum should think of him- or herself as a maths teacher.
Mathematics is joined up, and its practitioners need to join up too. By presenting a united face, the maths community has the best chance to engage those who feel disconnected from the subject. And by recognising that we are all on a spectrum, in our own ways we are all capable of being mathematicians and maths teachers.
[see also our post on Rob's recent book How Many Socks Make a Pair?]
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