Recap of Week 1

Hello! Good to see you. I hope you enjoyed the first week of Asian Teaching Practice. This course -as you might know- is a follow-up of the previous one which was a bit more theoretical and here we become more practical. However, in the first week there is a bit of overlap so that people can also do this course independently. And it was interesting to see that you engaged with the materials, you commented on, for example, the TIMSS quiz and it’s also interesting to see that most of you gave slightly similar types of comments.

For example, you were saying “well can you really compare countries at that level?”, “countries are far too too different perhaps to actually see commonalities” and many of you also commented about the reading that you now have to do in a lot of maths tasks. And that’s a very good point. There even is a report called ‘a relationship report’ where actually in year 4 TIMSS has looked at the relationship between reading and mathematics and it turns out that if you are not so good at reading, you might be even at a disadvantage with mathematics, which you could say is slightly strange because you try to actually measure whether you’re good at mathematics.

I’ll put a link under this step so that you can actually read up a little bit more, if you are interested. Another thing we did this week is we actually had two people from China talk about Chinese classrooms. And if I refer to knowing things about different countries and maybe learning something for your own teaching practice, I find it extremely inspiring to actually listen to other people from those countries whether it’s Asia, Australia, North America, Europe etc. etc.

It is not a case of actually having to adopt everything -because some things are very, very difficult to adopt and are more part of you could say a national culture- but it certainly will make you think how might you adapt your own mathematics teaching and actually improve your own classroom practice, when it comes to mathematics. I think some of you commented about the large classrooms but also about the way that materials were organised in Chinese classrooms, and I think most of you enjoyed listening to these practitioners. Okay we’re gonna go to the second week and because this is teaching practice we’re going to make it quite concrete.

Literally, because the topic will be an approach from Singapore, called the Concrete-Pictorial-Abstract approach. And that basically means that certain things will be extremely concrete. I’ve got some Lego blocks here now, and I also have a textbook with me for example and we will use this textbook to illustrate some of the principles. And you will actually work from this textbook and we’ll record some videos where I -well we have recorded them- where I actually discuss the pages in this book and how you could actually utilise it in your own classroom practice. So I hope you will enjoy the second week and I will see you in the comments.