Journal Article-Equity

This article relates to the principle of equity in a number of different ways. Equity relates to individualizing instruction so that all students have the ability to learn math, regardless of how they learn the concepts. Involving different mediums of learning to help struggling learners is just one way that equity can be applied to classrooms. The equity principle also shows how we need to relate math to real-life experiences so that children understand the importance of mathematics. This journal article shows how teachers have a hard time relating everyday math concepts to real-life experiences on a consistent basis. Because of this issue, six elementary teachers became interested in developing a study to find different methods for teaching mathematics so that their students could better understand math concepts. These teachers were also interesting in finding new ways to aid the struggling students in their classrooms. In their research, they found that most teachers fall into the category of white and middle class. Teachers that are white and middle class have a harder time relating to the diverse students in their classrooms. By gaining sensitivity to other cultures in our classrooms we can become more understanding of how people learn. During the study, the six teachers conducted research on specific targeted students. They focused on the thinking process of specific students and their math learning as well as their life outside of school. These two factors helped them gain understanding to how these specific children were learning mathematics. For example, one of the teachers focused on a student who had great counting skills compared to other children in the class. When looking at his outside experiences, the teacher found that the child could count to high numbers because he had experience at home counting jewels on his mother's belt. Because of this, the teacher realized that the jewels must have excited the child to learn about counting skills. The teacher could then look at that experience and figure out how to apply similar experiences in the classroom to aid both that student and other students in the counting process. Teachers then took their knowledge and developed a program in their school where they could aid struggling students in their math learning. The teachers developed a system where they chose one struggling student from each class that could then attend a math workshop during the morning. Each teacher was able to take a turn teaching this math workshop while the other teachers taught students from other classrooms as well. This way teachers could get to know the struggling students on a deeper, more individual level. Teachers found that in these workshops, not all students come to school with the same background knowledge or experiences. By working individually with struggling students and finding new methods for teaching them, slowly the teachers began to see improvements in their mathematical understanding. This shows how equity needs to be shown in our classrooms so that everyone has the opportunity to learn through different mediums. I think that it would have been a good idea to incorporate a technology aspect into the struggling learner's workshop to see how it could have affected the teachers' study. I believe students who have not had the same outside experiences with math need to have different mediums to aid their understanding of concepts. Math is already a difficult subject for students to understand, and we as teachers need to realize that our instruction needs to be adapted and individualized for specific students.