Shannon Smith King, Elementary Education
Description of Project
I planned to study the development of a student teacher (myself) in the use of math manipulatives to aid in math instruction and learning. Desired Results
I expected to see an increase in student math scores as a result of the use of manipulatives to teach and learn math concepts.
Problems
As a student teacher, I discovered that there were to be many problems with completing this project as planned. First, it was brought to my attention that, because I was only to be responsible for this classes learning for a period of 5 months, I was to follow the strict guidelines set forth by the classroom teacher. These guidelines included the planning, the subject matter choice, and the time schedule as set forth by this teacher. I also soon discovered that I would not be responsible for the assessment of the students’ learning as I had previously thought. I was also made aware of the fact that this classroom teacher did not share the same philosophy and ideas concerning math instruction and learning. Finally, even though there was a complete set of 4th grade manipulatives in the classroom, I was pressured to not use them to an extreme extent and to keep paced with my lessons as the other 4th grade classes did. This produced the problem of time constraints and the opportunities for the use of manipulatives were numbered and limited.
Experiences
As stated above under “problems,” I was under close time restraints for each math lesson that I taught. I found out within the first week of teaching and planning that I would not have enough time to provide the students the opportunity to use and manipulate before the actual classwork began. I tried to modify my planning to include daily journal-writing for Math, but I found that this time was considered not useful by the classroom teacher and so I was asked to stop this project. I then modified again, and tried to plan the use of munipulativcs into my instruction of the concepts as much as I could. This seemed to work, but the children were missing out on the use of the manipnlatives to aid in their “hands on” learning. I finally ended up using manipulatives with only one lesson per week, which made seeing any results from the use of manipnlatives very hard to detect. Another major frustration that I found was with the differing philosophies or beliefs towards math instruction that the classroom teacher and myself had developed. I feel that math instruction should involve the students as well as the teacher. This can be accomplished through the hands-on learning that comes with the introduction and continued usc of manipulativcs. The classroom teacher felt that the instruction should come from the teacher directly and then the time should be left for the students to complete written work from the math book. She felt that the use of manipulatives was only “playing with toys.”
Strengths/Weaknesses
I feel that even though the majority of this project was not as successful as I had expected, I did grow in certain aspects related to teaching. For instance, now I fully understand the time-crunch that teachers sometimes feel in trying to teach all subjects in a limited number of hours each day. I also feel that I grew tremendously in my ability to correlate my instruction with the use of student manipulatives. I feel that this growth was as a direct result of my constantly having to justify the use of manipulatives with my lessons. A major weakness that I felt was that I was not able to learn to use a large number of different manipulatives. Because of the limited number of months that I was teaching, I was not able to explore different math concepts and ideas.
Findings/Implications
I feel very strongly about the opportunity for undergraduate student to be able to study and explore a topic of their choice. But, at the same time, I feel that in a student-teaching situation, the actual studying and opportunity to tmly explore a topic is very limited. This must be a consideration for a research project to be successful. In a scientific sense, I guess my project was successful in proving my desired result incorrect.