It can be hard to see the advantages and disadvantages of teaching without procedures as we can’t line up the two side by side. Yet, the advantages do outweigh the disadvantages and they can have a profound effect on the future learning of students. One of the most important advantages is that this type of teaching provokes the inventive thinking of students as they use the skills they have to understand the world around them. This also causes them to think for themselves and gain real concrete understanding like the students in the paper did about fractions. I think that as teachers use this method, it also helps students learn to work, discover, and be productive in group settings. This can be seen in the paper as the students worked on 1 divided by 2/3. By the end of the paper, you could see that they had become confident in their ability to reason out things for themselves, a very useful skill in the world today.
There can be disadvantages to teaching math without teaching procedures and spoon feeding them. One that has been clear to me is certain students will not be successful in those types of situations due to different learning styles and even learning disabilities. Some students could be left behind. And sometimes, when a student thinks he or she is correct after doing their own thinking, and then is unable to understand the correct way of doing something, this can cause some to give up. Just like in all other types of teaching, it takes a lot of effort on the teacher’s part in order to make sure no one gets left behind. The other obvious disadvantage is that a teacher who is not skilled at this type teaching could spend way too much time on a given topic. It leaves a lot to be desired of in teachers. To impliment this teaching style, it would take a very collective effort of teachers from all grades.
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I definitely agree with your last sentence. It would take an extreme amount of effort on multiple teachers' parts due to the fact that if the students learn math one way one year, and then the next year they learn it another, it could get very frustrating to them. I must admit that I got a bit lost in the second paragraph. It feels like there wasn't a really good flow of thought throughout. Other than that, nice job!!
ReplyDeleteI feel you could have had a clearer topic sentence in the first paragraph. Great job on the second paragraph.
ReplyDeleteYou did a great job developing your advantages.
I think that students of that type will be more successful in this classroom. Here they have someone they feel more comfortable voicing their concerns and misconceptions.
This way of teaching is very demanding of teachers and requires a good work force. Yeah for you!
I agree that students learn inventive thinking and this will help them in more than just mathematical situations. Students who learn constructively learn how to analyze situations and will be able to apply this principle to the world around them. It is a risk in every classroom for students to get left behind. I don't believe that there will ever be a classroom where students will all have the same learning styles or abilities.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what you said about this teaching style being difficult for students who have a hard time understanding the material. This style can easily leave them behind. I also agree that, for this teaching style to be effective the teacher needs to know what she is doing and this style needs to continue for more than one school year. I feel like this teaching style has more disadvantages than you wrote however; I feel like this style would take longer making students learn less material. I also wonder what would happen if the students reasoned eachother into wrong decisions.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with the fact that this kind of teaching allows children to learn how to think for themselves and understand concepts in a much more complete way than just spoon feeding algorithms do. One thing that concerns me about this kind of teaching is that I know some students would sit back and let their classmates dominate discussions, whether it's because they don't know how to do something or because they're just lazy.
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