I had a really interesting experience this week that has made me think about perception, my practice and whether experience and enthusiasm for one’s subject is enough.
I had the opportunity to work with the MA2 students this week, not in my capacity as a lecturer in education but as someone talking about their experience as a headteacher.
My perception of this input was that the students were more engaged in what I had to say, they interacted more willingly and there seemed to be an atmosphere in room of genuine interest in the subject matter. One group even intimated that they felt that they should have given me a round of applause. I suspect this has not ever crossed their minds at the end of a mathematics lecture!
This flagged up several questions for me about what was different between this input and my others:
- Was it the subject matter?
- Was it the fact I was speaking about my experience as someone the students respect, i.e. a headteacher?
- Was it the fact the students were sitting in TDT groups rather than their usual friendship groups?
- Was I imagining things and was it more to do with how I was feeling rather than the students’ responses?
Subject matter – well…this is a whole other post I suspect. Mmmm…learning about maths as opposed to thinking about aspects of multi-agency working? I always try to think of ways to make what I’m saying and what the students are doing in my mathematics lectures/workshops interesting and engaging but perhaps that’s what I think I’m doing and is not the reality of the situation. However, perhaps the students have a different mind-set going into mathematics lectures than they do for other subjects and even if I was to do exactly the same in mathematics as I did for the multi-agency input they still would react differently. There were more opportunities to discuss things in the multi-agency input but that was the nature of input and during mathematics inputs there are different pressures and things to get through. Saying this I had a workshop with the MA2s later the same day which was completely practical in nature with very little direct teaching but lots of opportunities for talking, discussing, asking questions and engaging in mathematical activities. Whilst the vast majority of the students seemed to enjoy and participate enthusiastically in the activities, I perceived the engagement not to be as widespread as in the morning’s multi-agency input. This makes me wonder whether my third question above has a part to play in this as the students get to choose who they sit with, interact with and work with in my workshops – perhaps I should mix things up a little?
Did the fact I was speaking from experience as a headteacher make a difference to the students’ willingness to participate? This is a really interesting question as I would contend that I have far more experience and knowledge about mathematics learning and teaching to share with the students than I do about my time as a headteacher. Is it that they get me regularly in my role as their maths lecturer and familiarity breeds contempt?
Unfortunately, through all of this I seem to have more questions than answers and questions that will probably never be answered.
My next steps? Well…I can only do what I can do and I cannot make people be enthusiastic about my subject or love it the way I do. I can show my enthusiasm, which I think I already do, and prepare learning which motivates and encourages students to see the value in our time together; however, as face-to-face contact is so precious and limited sometimes there has to be ‘telling’ and not as much ‘experimenting’.
I wholeheartedly believe that mathematics is a subject where children should learn through activities that stimulate thinking and discussion about strategies and which young people can see has relevance to their day-to-day lives whilst also being:
“…beautiful, intriguing, elegant, logical, amazing and mind-blowing; a language and a set of systems and structures used to make sense of and describe the physical and natural world” (Ollerton, 2003, p.8).
This being said, it is my job as a university lecturer to teach our student teachers how to teach mathematics, how to plan activities and learning which will engage their learners not necessarily for the students to engage in the same activities; I can only ultimately provide the kindling and matches for the fire and it is up to them to decide to light it or not!
References
Ollerton, M. (2003) Getting the buggers to add up. Chippenham: Antony Rowe.
