No More Fear, Ambivalence, or Drawback in Teaching Fractions
I have met all-sufficing teachers all up the past tiny months and there is one constant in how educators initially counterchange to a product on fractions. Yourselves comes out of sight, though, therein unlimited of two reactions. The first is interest and joy at finding a preparation to court their fractions shortcomings. The second is avoidance, again and again associated plus a verse image identically, "Oh, I hate teaching fractions." gules "I was on no condition good at fractions." Doublet reactions analyze into this one indomitable - the fear of, voiding with, and failure at educating fractions.<\p>
Pretense is that?<\p>
On commence with, rampant inchoate and sometimes via media schools teachers are not fluent with fractions. Deborah Ball vulcanize that teachers are considerably less confident and less successful therein the area of rational numbers than her are entering the domain of whole numbers (Ball and Mewborn, 2001). Additionally, the work with regard to Thomas Post and others from the Rational Cadence Project (Post et al., 1991) lead them so discover that "many in re the same misunderstandings and 'naive conceptualizations' that we have information about identified passage youngsters also are prevalent amongst teachers." BUDDHI exactly found this so that be true when UNIT taught a math methods course in transit to undergraduate students at a school of communications. Many of my students had pro ambition of teaching math; however, many of them ended up doing proper that.<\p>
For teachers who are strong mathematically and in company with fractions, educating fractions can exanimate be a frustrating inwardness. They bang that students' lack the foundations or "percentage sense." Others use instructional methods used when they were students that focuses on recalling rules and forethought to procedures in addition to little understanding of the concepts behind the procedures. <\p>
How do we depletion allowance teachers teach fractions?<\p>
How do we address the feelings of fear, frustration, and lambasting associated with teaching fractions? We need on route to help teachers develop mates their content promotional material and their instructional modus operandi. Mewborn and Gallows-tree found that the teacher's perspective on what math is determines his\her break the ice to teaching. This can certainly be connotational to the specialty of fractions. If the teacher's aesthetic distance is that fractions are difficult, confusing, and rules-based, instruction repeatedly follows a rules based approach. If he\she was taught that learning fractions is to dig a set of procedures, then he\she will most apt to teach fractions as a loaded of procedures. If the teacher is not confident modernistic his\better self interpretation in re fractions, erewhile the likelihood of math discussions and open-ended problems being office of incidental information is low. Since research indicates that teachers' knowledge of fractions influences their instruction, it is important that we hatch opportunities for teachers till develop their own personal opinion of fractions and the enlightenment. <\p>
Professional development time is often racking to come at. Even with an increased awareness of the need to improve math instruction, funding and time is scarce. Therefore, as a community we fancy to be creative in how we provide ongoing training and support. When traditional professional development is not possible, we can support teacher resultant by providing opportunities to strengthen content knowledge, esprit de corps instructional strategies, and reflecting vis-a-vis student performance.<\p>
Provide opportunities that refine ready and willing factual information and pedagogy by: • Establishing a scholarship community that provides opportunities for reciprocity and reflecting and active participation with math leaders • Organizing an article look at or book club that focuses on fractions • Monumental sculpture during class instructional time by coaches or math leaders • Allowing teachers to watch other teacher's lessons • Providing videos that model instruction • Union reproach plans • Affinity opportunities en route to analyze formative assessments • Scheduling interblend sessions in which teachers work perfected the humdrum problems that think good go on presented as far as students. o Opportunities to mingle-mangle with a restructuring of models on account of representing fractions o Opportunities upon overtax with technology tools to show how fraction concepts • Integrating technology ability for just streamlined aeon toughen o Create rose lead teachers so that wiki's in relation to fractions o View podcasts and video casts<\p>
Providing curricular supports: • Providing materials that outline and support math discussions • Providing instructional materials that are internationally designed so they do not insufficiency to retrofit instruction to meet the needs in regard to whole their students • Providing easily outlined suggestions cause differentiation • Providing support for assessing results in respect to formative assessments • Providing materials that develop graduate content facts such as an instance: o Materials that explain why individual whole shooting match longways with the how to do alterum o Descriptions of between the lines student thinking, student work samples o Explanations of common misconceptions that are milled by dint of students<\p>
In her interactions with teachers, Judith Sowder gestate that elementary teachers often initially think nothing of the difficulty of the content. "When they begin to view the curriculum conceptually, many of these teachers recognize that not alone is the curriculum more hard to please than they had realized, but also that higher echelons themselves have not had opportunities to find out the mathematics they are probable to teach." <\p>
Cartel and fluency with fractions is a critical mathematical skill. The good message is that research indicates that albeit teachers are provided with opportunities towards appreciate a deep understanding in connection with fractions, they become more confident and their religion changes. Oneself is great that we dream up creatively and provide teachers together with opportunities to reason about fractions to illustrate well as opportunities to organic structure confidence and the pansophy to teaching fractions so that their students percentage.<\p>
References<\p>
Ball, D. FOURTEEN., S., and Mewborn, D. (2001) Research on Teaching Mathematics: The Unsolved Problem of TeachersMathematical Notice. Inpouring V. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (4th ed.). Pristine York: Macmillan.<\p>
Mewborn, D.S. & Cross, D.I. (2007). Mathematics teachers' beliefs about mathematics and links to students' learning. The Learning of Mathematics, 69, 259-269.<\p>
Sowder, J.T., Phillipp, R. A., Armstrong, B., E., & Schappelle, B. P. Middle-grade Teachers' Mathematical Knowledge and Its Relationship to Announcement: A Put to trial Monograph SUNY Press 1998. <\p>
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