Taking the opportunity for a (self) teaching moment.
If a week is a long time in politics, how long is a week in a school? A good mathematical estimate would be twice as long as half its length.
Heading into a second year as an educator there are moments to reflect on, areas of growth to identify and goals to achieve.
What I would love to focus on are the teaching moments that spasmodically arise in any given week of education.
A teaching moment is found in those split-second decisions where an opportunity presents to diverge from the current topic, in order to explore something related, build additional skills and knowledge that can then be transposed back to the starting point. In particular I will be looking through a lens of mathematics teaching.
As a subject, mathematics is notoriously taught by a curriculum organised in a linear way. There is common sense approach that there is the necessity to build some foundational skills before moving forward. Though I wonder if we hold onto this approach for too long in our education system. A lot of international mathematical teaching models are building from a constructivist approach, a “hands-on approach in the United States, “la main à la pâte” (hands in the dough) in France, or learning by doing in China.”1
It is important we consider the constructivist approach when unpacking the opportunities for a teaching moment – this is what is driving our pedagogy. One definition of constructivism to is, ‘an approach to learning that holds that people actively construct or make their own knowledge and that reality is determined by the experiences of the learner’2 A guiding question organically forms about how this might impacts the moment.
As a teacher newer to the practise, it is even more essential to reflect on the implications of teaching moments. Stockero & Van Zoest find that, ‘[a graduate teacher] may be oriented towards using students thinking in his or her instruction but [are] constrained by a lack of skill in doing so.’4
How as educators do we build our skills? Reflective practice.
As usual, at the end of a post I am left with more questions than answers. I believe that I have a good grasp on being flexible in the classroom and intuitively sense a moment to pause and teach what is required. Though perhaps the effectiveness of my approach can be reflected and improved on.
There are 31 million, 536 thousand seconds in any given week to do so.
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References
1Munier, V., & Merle, H. (2009). Interdisciplinary mathematics–physics approaches to teaching the concept of angle in elementary school. International journal of science education, 31(14), 1857-1895.
2Elliott, S.N., Kratochwill, T.R., Littlefield Cook, J. & Travers, J. (2000). Educational psychology: Effective teaching, effective learning (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill College.
3Hill, H. C., & Ball, D. L. (2004). Learning mathematics for teaching: Results from California’s mathematics professional development institutes. Journal for research in mathematics education, 330-351.
4Stockero, S. L., & Van Zoest, L. R. (2013). Characterizing pivotal teaching moments in beginning mathematics teachers’ practice. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 16(2), 125-147.
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