Fourteen years ago I was starting my teacher training course. I had already been teaching a little (two undergraduate courses at university) and been to a mathematics education conference and numerous seminars. But I felt as though I knew nothing about teaching as a discipline and a career. After leaving my teacher training there were still so many things I did not know!
It’s impossible for teacher training courses to completely prepare teachers for what lies ahead. Mostly I hear other teachers say that they learned nothing of use in their training. But there are two things I still remember and draw from daily or weekly, fourteen years later.
1. Students need to experience an idea in order to learn it.
I was greatly impacted by reading Experience and Education by John Dewey. (It was a set text in my Philosophy of Education class.) In it, I learned that students need to play around with ideas in their pursuit of understanding. They need to create, investigate, take apart, put together, describe, and explain. Students shouldn’t be told what to think but come to think it for themselves. Additionally, students need to come at a concept from many angles before they gain a deep understanding of it. (Some of the other ideas in Experience and Education don’t sit so well with me anymore. That’s another blog post.)
For several years after first becoming a teacher I was struggling to keep pace with my workload and found it really hard to help students experience ideas. But I decided to make sure I thought about this in detail during my planning time once a week, or twice a week, or more often as I became able. Now it is the founding statement of my education platform: students must experience mathematics in order to learn it. I ask myself, how could a student come across this idea? How could them come to investigate it?
Continue reading “Two Things I Learned in My Teacher Training that I Still Use Today”