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Area teachers attending the University of Houston-Clear Lake School of Education Math Institute experiment with “manipulatives,” various materials used to teach children mathematical concepts. Manipulatives provide children with hands-on experience and an actual visual representation of mathematical concepts. Pictured (l to r) are Saundra Christopher of Goose Creek Consolidated Independent School District; Valerie Clem of Galveston ISD; and Anna Maire of Goose Creek CISD.
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Area teachers learn new ways to teach at Math Institute
Paper, scissors, colorful squares and Lego-like cubes in a room full of middle school mathematics teachers hard at work cutting, laying out, building – welcome to the Math Institute 2008-2009 at University of Houston-Clear Lake’s School of Education. What might look like child’s play is actually work for the 17 teachers from area school districts who have met each month during the last year to learn new ways of introducing kids to the subject of math.
The Math Institute, in its 28th year, is made possible by an $87,000 grant from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s Teacher Quality Grants Program awarded to UH-Clear Lake Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction Suzanne Brown. The institute’s intent is to help strengthen mathematic teaching abilities in sixth- to eighth-grade math teachers in schools where TAKS scores by students indicate a need for greater content knowledge and instructional skills improvement. Previous grants have covered such topics as fractions, probability, geometry, and measurement. This year the focus is on algebra, a subject that once was not introduced to students until high school but is now part of both the elementary and the middle school curriculum.
With the dawn of the high tech age came a demand from employers for employees with greater critical thinking skills, explains Brown.
“The level of math in the real world has increased tremendously, but just as importantly is the ability of students to problem-solve, to think outside of the box,” she says.
Brown, a teacher and educator for more than 40 years, taught fourth grade in the 1960s.
“The difference between what students are expected to do now (mathematically) as compared to the ‘60s is just absolutely phenomenal. There is no comparison,” she states.
In the “old days” when most of today’s parents and teachers were in school, math was more about straight calculation.
“The student was given a problem and asked for the answer; once the student provided the answer that was the end of it. That is not the case anymore,” she explains. “Students are given a situation and asked to design a solution.”
Brown believes the old-fashioned ‘stand and deliver’ method of teaching math, though still used by some teachers, is not an effective way to teach the subject. Learning new and more effective techniques is at the heart of the grant, and the Math Institute.
Among new techniques is utilizing “manipulatives,” which are materials such as blocks, tiles, cubes or even paper cutouts that physically represent numbers or mathematical concepts. These objects provide students an actual hands-on experience, as well as a visual representation, Brown explains, which makes it easier for the kids to grasp and understand the process.
“For example, if I say ‘X plus Y’ to the average child - those are just letters and they don’t make a lot of sense,” Brown continues. “But with an algebra manipulative, I can show them a picture of X. I can show them a picture of Y. I can show them a picture of X squared. So there’s a visual for students to use, to process before they go to the abstract.”
She explains that with manipulatives a teacher can guide a student in solving a problem so that it will make sense to the child, rather than having the child attempt to memorize a series of meaningless steps.
Attending the Math Institute allows teachers to experiment with manipulatives and lessons before introducing them to their students.
“Teachers have so many stresses and so much on their plate, so pulling in something new without any background on it is pretty iffy, pretty chancy on their part,” Brown says.
Each year she attends the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ annual meeting, where a building half the size of the George Brown Convention Center is filled with vendors offerings books, manipulatives and resources.
“I’m always walking through the vendor area looking for resources that I think would be appropriate for my grant teachers,” she says. “During the institute we do an activity just as it is in the published book. We try it in our class, then 17 teachers and I tweak it. Once the teachers are ready to go back into their classroom to teach it, they’re pretty comfortable with the material.”
Besides exploring and practicing new techniques with manipulatives, which the teachers get to keep and take back to their schools, there is a second part to the institute that Brown calls “share sessions.” Each grant participant selects one of their most successful lesson plans and presents it to the class. The teachers love the sessions.
“You get all sorts of new lesson plans and activities that you can take back to your classroom. But, you have the opportunity to try the activity out with other teachers,” says Dawn Taylor a fifth-grade teacher in Galveston ISD. The sharing doesn’t stop at the institute.
“We had two teachers attend, and we would bring the activities back to the school and share those activities with the other teachers,” Taylor says of her school. “So it wasn’t just the two of us doing these activities. They were being shared throughout the school with the other teachers.”
Taylor adds, “Over the last two years my TAKS scores came up quite a bit…we were able to use these activities and bring our scores up – schoolwide.”
Carol Odom, a fifth- and sixth-grade math/science facilitator in Pasadena ISD who has taught math for eleven years, believes teachers need to constantly revamp their teaching. She enjoys the institute.
“It’s very rewarding all the way around both for the teachers taking part and then for the kids that they go back and work with. You may have taught a certain subject for years, but you go to the Institute and you learn new activities to use or different ways to teach.”
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