educator | Learning with Miss Dickson…

Yesterday, in my place of work, I found myself astonished by the sight and sound of a mother silencing her child.

Allow me to contextualise the situation for you. I work in a restaurant located in our City Centre. It is always busy with guests coming in for the first time, the second time, or coming in for their weekly order. So yesterday, work was extremely busy and therefore the noise levels were expectedly high. However, I could not ignore what I heard one woman say.

I allowed my eyes to glance across tables and they stopped on one table in particular. At this table sat eight guests who had come in together and going by first judgement, they were a family – made up of what I can only presume was two brothers, around three and five years old, along with their parents, grandmother and perhaps other relatives or failing that, family friends.

Now, in my place of work is one huge stone oven which does not ignore the flames that provide it with a warm glow and extreme heat. The boy, of about five years of age, sat at the table and was staring at this oven in absolute amazement. Of course he would be – it’s an enormous oven and most definitely is not your standard oven in your kitchen at home. He was amazed. It was something new to him. Something wonderful and exciting.

He turned to his mother with absolute excitement lighting up his face, wide-eyed and open-mouthed and said,
“Look! Mum, look at that!!! Our pizza is in that oven, look!”.
At that moment lay an opportunity for the mother to endlessly discuss the most exciting thing this boy had discovered – the oven!

Instead, she turned to him, ignoring the subject that provided him with such amazement, and silenced him with,
“Sssh, be quiet.”

I was in shock. You may be wondering why I was left feeling shocked and quite simply empathetic towards this boy. You see, this child should be immersed in language. Engaged with language. Not silenced when something is open for discussing, explaining and being interested in. His mother could quite easily have turned to her son and described the oven, asked him questions about it, used language to indicate a sharing of excitement and amazement about what her son had sighted.

I am fully aware the oven is not the most exciting thing for an adult to lay eyes on. However, as teachers, parents, educators or caregivers, it is crucial that we recognise children’s learning is embedded from a young age, they are learning all the time; and that is what we need to get right – we need to identify the gaps for learning and fill those gaps with knowledge, vocabulary, insights and perspectives. With language, there are a mass amount of opportunities to do this.

It is moments like this when children are surprised, amazed and intrigued about something at which it is necessary to capture this interest and go with it. Silencing a child when they show interest in something can only teach them not to display signs of true hysteria.

Celebrate this, engage this, and most importantly ask questions. Be involved by talking, discussing and conversing using your language skills and understanding, in order to facilitate the child’s learning and awareness of language. Show emotions with language and use words the child will question the meaning of; use terminology to challenge the child appropriately and broaden the vocabulary of the child.

As cited in The Really Useful Literacy Book (3rd edn.), it is suggested that children learn by understanding and remembering, which is essentially achieved effectively by ensuring application and regular revision (Martin, T., Lovat, C., Purnell, G., 2012). I agree with this and I suggest that in order for children to learn, understand, remember and progress language skills, it is profound that they are immersed in a language-rich environment,

The focus of this reflection is not about the oven. It is about spoken language.

“Limited subject matter knowledge restricts a teacher’s capacity to promote conceptual learning among students. Even a strong belief of “teaching mathematics for understanding” cannot remedy or supplement a teacher’s disadvantage in subject matter knowledge. A few beginning teachers in the procedurally directed group wanted to “teach for understanding.” They intended to involve students in the learning process, and to promote conceptual learning that explained the rationale underlying the procedure. However, because of their own deficiency in subject matter knowledge, their conception of teaching could not be realized. Mr. Felix, Ms. Fiona, Ms Francine, and Ms. Felice intended to promote conceptual learning. Ironically, with a limited knowledge of the topic, their perspectives in defining the students’ mistake and their approach to dealing with the problem were both procedurally focused. In describing his ideas about teaching, Mr. Felix said: “I want them to really think about it and really use manipulatives and things where they can see what they are doing here, why it makes sense to move it over one column. Why do we do that? I think that kids are capable of understanding a lot more rationale for behavior and actions and so on than we really give them credit for a lot of times. I think it is easier for anybody to do something and remember it once they understand why they are doing it that way“.”
– Liping Ma, Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics (2010, page 36)

The most important thing to remember when teaching maths – when teaching anything – as the teacher, the educator and the facilitator, is that you must understand what you are teaching. This is what Ma (2010, p. 36) is talking about here.

As a teacher and a professional educator, you are responsible for providing knowledge to your learners, not just passing it to them as information in a book or in the form of confusing statistics and facts, but as an understood conceptual view of the content. If you do not understand what you are teaching, this may invite opportunity for confidence to fall in your learners – you are the trusted educator in the classroom, on which your learners depend on to provide subject matter with an understanding you have thoroughly revised, in order to adapt the content to best explain it to them.

Outsmarted?… Imagine this. You are planning a lesson – a maths lesson. You have a vague and somewhat passive understanding of the content you intend to teach. And so you think your learners will trust that you understand what input they are going to receive, because, after all, you are the teacher. Right? That passive understanding you have, is only going to brush off onto your learners. Children are observant and will easily pick up on your mistakes, your struggles and perhaps your lack of confidence when you are teaching them. So, you plan your lesson, still intact with your passive understanding of the content you intend to teach. Then it comes to your lesson and your learner outsmarts you. Perhaps in the form of a question, that you cannot answer. Is this due to your negligence?

Your learners depend on you to know what you are talking about, and here, Ma, explains the profound importance to approach your intended learning content with a conceptual view – if you understand, you have more chance of your learners understanding!

References

Ma, L. (2010) Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics – Teachers’ Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and The United States. London: Routledge.

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