how important is the teaching method?

If you want research

TIMSS — Third International Math and Science Study.
Worth reading more, but in general going around the world there are two basic styles of math teaching in developed countries, US and everybody else.
The following are generalizations and over-simplifications but this is the general gist of the research:

US — highly dependent on following textbooks literally; everybody else — a curriculum based on goals of skills achievement (Often with much more difficult testing than US)
US — teachers tend to give recipes or formulas; everybody else — teachers tend to “develop concepts” ie actually teach
US — a lot of filling in papers; everybody else — discussion and reasoning, then application
US — most money, most time, most additional equipment, and among the lowest levels of achievement; everybody else — less money, same or less time, but more progress
US — highest self esteem and confidence, among the lowest in achievement; everybody else the opposite
US — both teachers and students blame math failure or rarely success on inborn ability; everybody else — math success or failure seen as a result of work

Just in case someone comes out with the old tired excuses, no, these studies were set up by US researchers.
And no, Japan and Germany have as much or more TV watching.

Be careful when you look up information about this on various websites; as with the National Reading Panel, there are a lot of people out there who have a vested interest in the status quo and will try to make the report say the exact opposite of what it actually says.

I have certainly seen this in my son’s classes…

lots of repetitious problems from the book
lessons directly from the book
little discussion on concepts
taught only one way to solve problems
absolutely NO thought required (no word problems)

Students, in my experience, tend to dislike math intensely. They find it dull, difficult, and meaningless. We’ve got to change that.

Yes, this absolutely has to be changed.

One big problem — the very worst people *think* they are doing a good thing. They have bought into the ritual aspect of teaching, like the ritual of the weekly spelling test. Even though there is no evidence that it actually teaches anything other than how to perform the ritual, we absolutely must have the formulas memorized and the papers filled in and the weekly grades and so on. If you take this away they get frantic, total panic. They went through this ritual themselves in high school and it is the only thing they know. They also hated their math classes and suffered through them and they think suffering is the way to virtue. It is very hard to work against this kind of ingrained attitude.

Second big problem — the students and parents have also bought into it. If you take away the constant threat of bad grades, the students won’t do any work. In their mind math = punishment, so the only reason you do it is to escape even worse punishment. If you don’t send home a paper to be filled in every night, the parents get incensed and come storming down on the principal because their kids aren’t “learning”. I know, I’ve been the crazy teacher who *didn’t* send home an hour of homework every night in Grades 1 and 2. Some parents liked it, but a large number got up petitions to have me fired, no fooling. The fact that my class had higher test scores than any other group in the school before or since, and also great self-confidence, was beside the point, apparently.

Funny things happen when people try to change an institution. One attempt at change is the “Everyday Math” program which a lot of people here dislike, for some very good reasons. It started out as a problem-solving discussion-based experiment to lift low-achieving students in poor schools. Then it became an institutional program itself, sold to all sorts of schools, and it somehow absorbed all sorts of paperwork assignments and much of the bad it was supposed to be working against, while losing the flexibility and problem-solving orientation that was its selling point.

Do we need research for that question? When you were in school, did you ever have a teacher or teachers whose teaching excited you? Did you ever have a teacher who made what otherwise seemed a dull subject exciting or a confusing subject clear?

Lecturing in a monotone or even just speaking in a monotone isn’t considered the best way to communicate with others. In any case, that your son had a bad year in math this year - and possibly a bad teacher - doesn’t mean he can’t have a good year next year.

Ask him if he really hates math or if he hates math class. No teacher is the right teacher for every student.

Good luck.

Let me speak up here for the teachers who are called “bad” and “dull” and “boring” because they are not providing fast-paced entertainment every second. I have had the miserable experience of being the math teacher who followed after Mr. Z, who told jokes all year and was fun and one of the most popular teachers in the school, and all year I heard “When is Mr Z coming back? He was a *good* teacher, not like you”. Of course the kids covered half of one chapter of math all year and were two years behind standards and were cruising to fail a high-stakes test and never graduate, but hey, he was *fun* and not *boring*.

Sometimes in life you have to do things that don’t provide instant gratification on cue each and every thirty seconds like TV does. The very best teachers I have had were mostly quiet and sometimes on the surface might have appeared dull. The excitement was in the discovery of new ideas, something you have a hard time doing if you are being constantly diverted.

In math in particular, you have to have time for deep thought and working through things. This is not showy.

Sara — I’m not sure that my son can make the distinction between the subject and the teacher at this point. I have stressed to him that he must learn and do his best regardless of whether his teacher is exciting or not.

victoria — You are absolutely correct. We shouldn’t judge a teacher based on whether the kids “like” her but by her quality of teaching and by the level of thinking she expects of her students. On the other hand, if a teacher doesn’t keep her students engaged in the lesson, they aren’t going to learn as much, either. Engagement doesn’t mean “fun” and “exciting”, it only means that the student is involved in learning the material.

My son’s teacher has certainly “covered” a lot of material this year. I strongly feel, however, that there has not been much true understanding of math and how it is used. What I see is MUCH time spent on showing algorithms with LITTLE time spent on learning the “why” of the algorithms or how and when to apply them in other contexts. There has been emphasis on solving simple problems and little emphasis on solving complex problems using the math in everyday or real-world applications. I do not understand how students can learn to apply the math they learn unless they practice how to do it. I believe the kids need content-rich problems that require thinking, yet the ones assigned seem to be simply drill and practice. I know that drill and practice has its place, but it should be only a part of the picture, not the entire picture by itself.

In short, victoria, I see in my son’s math education all the things you listed in your post about the TIMSS. Maybe its not the teachers fault… it may just be an American thing… :?

I see what Victoria was talking about all the time. There are a lot of teachers who keep telling the students to have fun. They are constantly giving out rewards - candy, etc. In our system it is the new, young teachers who do this. I hear kids talking about how they like this and that teacher. Who wouldn’t? The kids are not learning their math in those grades and are behind the norm groups.

I agree too that part of it is our American way of life.
Everything is fast-paced with immediate, stimulating feedback.

There are lots of ways to make learning more meaningful to a student. Please note that I say “meaningful”, not “fun”. Many teachers know how to make learning both meaningful AND fun. If a teacher can do this, more power to him. Not all of what we hear about the “fun” teachers is true, just like not all of what we hear about the “boring” teachers is true.

When we teach our lessons, we should try to teach ALL of the students in our classes… that means teaching using effective methods. That means adjusting our teaching styles to more closely match the way kids learn our particular subject. I contend that lecture on a daily basis is not the best way to teach anyone, much less middle school students.

I haven’t read any research that supports the use of lecture as an effective teaching method. That’s not to say it isn’t out there, though. If anyone is aware of any research on the effectiveness of lecture, please let me know so I can be enlightened.

When I was in my MA in Education progam, the uselessness of which I have discussed previously, we had a required course in Methods of Education. The professor focused on a different class style each two-hour class. The first day he told us about the discovery method and how wonderful it was. The second day he told us about guided discovery and how it was even better. The third day he told us about the open classroom and how wonderful that was. And so on. The very last day, he told us all about the lecture method and how absolutely terrible it is. Nobody but me even cracked a smile noticing that the gentleman had been lecturing us for the previous forty hours straight through …

Anyway, the reference I have isn’t specifically about lecturing, but compares traditional teacher-directed classes versus open classroom style teaching at about the Grade 4-5 level. It is an excellent study chock-full of well-done observation and honest statistics and efforts to remove bias. The traditional classes came out ahead in every category, *including* self-esteem. The only group where there was a very small advantage for open classrooms was low-achieving boys. It was also noted that while traditional teaching came out ahead in every average, there were some high achieving open classes; on closer examination, one of these had the teacher’s daughter in it and a high-stakes test coming up . . . I can’t get the book out because it’s not shelved yet (renovations in progress) but it is called “Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress” (hope I got the name exactly right by memory) and if memory is working the author may be N Postman. It came out I believe some time in the 1980’s. I highly recommend this book to anyone as an example of a really well-done educational study, a rarity.

As far as lectures, my personal opinion is that learning to learn from lectures is an important skill, one that needs to be developed gradually over time. If teachers try to make things easy or interesting by *never* lecturing, they set students up for failure when the students move on to senior high and college where they are expected to know how to deal with this. This doesn’t mean only lecturing, but definitely building up to it.

In particular as a sometime college math instructor, I can tell you that in college science and technical classes, students had better be ready to deal with a lecture class because there simply is no time to do anything else.
Yes, it would be lovely to have time to experiment and play learning games and all that — please find me a college where the students will either pay the money or take the time to go to class twice as long as the standard. Always fun to have a student who is vociferously resentful when she has to stay in class one minute beyond the minimum time, and is equally ready to complain that the class is too hard and goes to fast — I’ve had that argument.

Victoria, could the author of the teaching style book be Neville Bennett?

Prolly Neil Postman… who also wrote “The End Of Education” (the title have dual meaning including “the end” as the purpose of education… as in “does the end justify the means”).

Neville Bennet — yes, sounds like that could be the right one. Great book, highly recommended.

Sorry for getting authors mixed, I am quoting from memory because all the education books are stacked in the corner of the room until the bookcases for them are rebuilt.

victoria — I will definitely read that paper this summer. I agree that students need to “learn how to learn from lecture” but I see that for some teachers it is all they do. I’m most concerned about this style of teaching at the middle school level where the students are not as focused as high school students. Maybe we also need to teach students different ways to take notes during a lecture. Most of the teachers I know put their notes up on the overhead projector and tell the students to copy them. There is much more to learning from a lecture than simply copying notes.

As far as “discovery” methods are concerned—far too many teachers take that method to the extreme and allow the students to do whatever they please in hopes that some learning will take place.

Teachers should plan activities with a specific learning goal in mind and should always direct students toward that goal. Carefully directed constructive learning activities have been shown to be effective for all kinds of students in science classes. Check out the physics education research carried out at Arizona State University, North Carolina State University, and the University of Washington. Here is one URL that has many articles posted: http://modeling.asu.edu/

My daughter is dyslexic, has overcome the reading issues, but has struggled with math. She has never done well on math and is beginning to actually believe she is never going to succeed. Any suggestions on what to do?

Hi. I have posted many suggestions for practical approaches. Rather than having me repeat myself at length, you could start by looking up my old posts (use search option for both victoria and victoriah) and seeing if any of them could be helpful to you. Then please feel free to ask for any other help, either on the board here or at my email [email protected].

How old is she? What are tahe specific issues? Has she been surviving by memorizing steps?

[quote=”victoria”]If you want research

What does the research say about the results of this? I understand that based on this US students performed less well on administered tests but I’m wondering what the real world effect might be?

US per capita GNP for example is over $10,000 and Canada’s, for example, stands at $700. Will that be changing as a result of the different instructional methods used in American math classrooms?

Health care is always a concern. What relationship to quality health care is there with the TIMSS data? Both the US and Canada, for example, have a high rate of medical errors in hospitals. Will countries other than the US which use the superior instructional methods for math reduce their hospital error rate the more quickly?

Any information on the connection of the findings of the TIMSS to real world application and the relative well being of the studies societies would be much appreciated.

TIMSS — Third International Math and Science Study.
Worth reading more, but in general going around the world there are two basic styles of math teaching in developed countries, US and everybody else.
The following are generalizations and over-simplifications but this is the general gist of the research:

US — highly dependent on following textbooks literally; everybody else — a curriculum based on goals of skills achievement (Often with much more difficult testing than US)
US — teachers tend to give recipes or formulas; everybody else — teachers tend to “develop concepts” ie actually teach
US — a lot of filling in papers; everybody else — discussion and reasoning, then application
US — most money, most time, most additional equipment, and among the lowest levels of achievement; everybody else — less money, same or less time, but more progress
US — highest self esteem and confidence, among the lowest in achievement; everybody else the opposite
US — both teachers and students blame math failure or rarely success on inborn ability; everybody else — math success or failure seen as a result of work

Just in case someone comes out with the old tired excuses, no, these studies were set up by US researchers.
And no, Japan and Germany have as much or more TV watching.

Be careful when you look up information about this on various websites; as with the National Reading Panel, there are a lot of people out there who have a vested interest in the status quo and will try to make the report say the exact opposite of what it actually says.[/quote]

Jonathan — I typed a detailed answer but it got lost in the computer timeout so here is a short note.

Your GNP numbers are WAY way off. Canada was rated by the UN as having the highest living standard in the world in the 1990’s, now third behind two Scandinavian countries, still ahead of the US. If GNP is measured by the SAME yardstick it will be similar.

One problem with all statistics, and even worse in international statistics, is the question of who is doing the measurements and how.

US healthcare is an international scandal. While huge amounts of money go to high-tech heroic measures for a very small number of patients, general health care is not good. Infant mortality is a common yardstick; it is both a tragedy to the family and a measure of access to and quality of general healthcare for the huge majority of the population. US infant mortality is among the highest in the developed world.

The “New Math” came out in the late 1960’s so its graduates hit universities and the job market from the mid 1970’s onward. That just happens to parallel a huge drop in the number of high school students taking physics, a drop in the number of university students majoring in sciences and math, shrinking graduate school enrollments in science and math, increasing numbers of foreign students in grad schools of science and math (foreign students doing better on US tests than US students do); and ever-increasing movement of technical and automotive manufacturing out of the US and into other countries. Cheap labour only explains part of this; labour in Japan and Germany is expensive so that argument doesn’t hold there, and cheap but *qualified* labour is important in the move of computer jobs to China and India.[/quote]

Impressive. So clearly the ripple in the pond effect is in full swing. Ah, well, it happens. Countries rise and fall. The US will join a long list along with ancient Greece, the Mayans and the Romans. We too can be a lost civilization studied by the children of better educated societies. Celebrate your good fortune that you live across the border and not in this nation of decline.

Your GNP numbers are WAY way off. Canada was rated by the UN as having the highest living standard in the world in the 1990’s, now third behind two Scandinavian countries, still ahead of the US. If GNP is measured by the SAME yardstick it will be similar.

One problem with all statistics, and even worse in international statistics, is the question of who is doing the measurements and how.

US healthcare is an international scandal. While huge amounts of money go to high-tech heroic measures for a very small number of patients, general health care is not good. Infant mortality is a common yardstick; it is both a tragedy to the family and a measure of access to and quality of general healthcare for the huge majority of the population. US infant mortality is among the highest in the developed world.

The “New Math” came out in the late 1960’s so its graduates hit universities and the job market from the mid 1970’s onward. That just happens to parallel a huge drop in the number of high school students taking physics, a drop in the number of university students majoring in sciences and math, shrinking graduate school enrollments in science and math, increasing numbers of foreign students in grad schools of science and math (foreign students doing better on US tests than US students do); and ever-increasing movement of technical and automotive manufacturing out of the US and into other countries. Cheap labour only explains part of this; labour in Japan and Germany is expensive so that argument doesn’t hold there, and cheap but *qualified* labour is important in the move of computer jobs to China and India.[/quote][/quote]

Welp, the thread’s kinda gotten away from how to help that kiddo — but M Gray has vanished…