My daughter's honors calculus course is using some of the Matsuyama-Takahashi-Lampert methods discussed in that article.
I'm
thrilled for her-- it's exactly what she needs to really light up with a subject. That Socratically-oriented approach is so powerful.
I'm just not sure how a textbook fits into that framework.
Eta my favorite quotes from that article:
Without the right training, most teachers do not understand math well enough to teach it the way Lampert does. “Remember,” Lampert says, “American teachers are only a subset of Americans.” As graduates of American schools, they are no more likely to display numeracy than the rest of us. “I’m just not a math person,” Lampert says her education students would say with an apologetic shrug.
I've frequently been APPALLED at the level of preparedness in the subject that my DD's teachers have themselves confessed to her (or me)-- while lovely and caring people by and large, there is something very wrong with a high school geometry instructor who "doesn't really understand calculus."
With the Common Core, teachers are once more being asked to unlearn an old approach and learn an entirely new one, essentially on their own. Training is still weak and infrequent, and principals — who are no more skilled at math than their teachers — remain unprepared to offer support. Textbooks, once again, have received only surface adjustments, despite the shiny Common Core labels that decorate their covers. “To have a vendor say their product is Common Core is close to meaningless,” says Phil Daro, an author of the math standards.
Indeed...
He listened carefully for what Japanese teachers call children’s twitters — mumbled nuggets of inchoate thoughts that teachers can mold into the fully formed concept they are trying to teach. And he worked hard on bansho, the term Japanese teachers use to describe the art of blackboard writing that helps students visualize the flow of ideas from problem to solution to broader mathematical principles.
YES, YES, YES--
this is the kind of dynamic classroom that isn't exactly "flipped" (though I suspect that it is the engine that drives success in flipped classrooms by keeping students actively engaged) and is highly successful for pretty much ANY discipline, and even moreso in STEM where students must master their own internal set of concepts in order to build a framework of real understanding and not just memorization.
I'm wondering if anyone has read Elizabeth Green's book, which was the basis of that NYT Magazine write up?
