Let them work it out, says maths teaching expert Mellony Graven, who believes current numeracy teaching in South Africa does not add up to international standards and that children should be allowed to use their own initiative more.
Let them work it out, says maths teaching expert Mellony Graven, who believes current numeracy teaching in South Africa does not add up to international standards and that children should be allowed to use their own initiative more.
Graven and Hamsa Venkat of Wits University were speaking recently at an international conference at Rhodes University aimed at building teacher confidence by giving them various ways of teaching numeracy skills.
The European Union Higher Education project for Foundation Phase Education was aimed at showing teachers how to effectively teach numeracy skills in a way that will stimulate children’s minds and lead to more creative problem-solving. The two professors are the FirstRand Foundation's South African Numeracy Chairs at Rhodes and Wits universities respectively. The conference was funded by the Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET) and the European Union (EU). It was one of many being held at universities around South Africa.
Numerous studies have shown that children who are exposed to various approaches to doing basic sums are more successful as this enables them to come up with their own methods.
Graven, a former maths teacher at St Andrew's College, addressed this problem at the conference. She said teachers' tendencies to enforce a single method of doing sums limits the children’s conceptual understanding and encourages them to passively follow the teacher’s lead without finding another way themselves.
“The conferences are mainly lectures of numeracy teachers, pre-service,” Venkat told Grocott's Mail. “Numeracy tends to be the subject in which teachers have the least confidence in their abilities to teach.”
The conference was attended by more than 200 people, mainly registered teachers. Many of those who attended were locally based teachers, while several were from overseas.
