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4 Ways to Improve Education Reform

Respect inductive principles for course design and delivery.

Test ideas for reform in optimal and sub-optimal conditions first - reform in haste, repent at leisure. Reforms like drugs should be tested before widespread use.

Provide materials and methods simple to understand and follow as a lower bound or safety net for teachers parachuted into unfamiliar topics.

For instruction not streamed by ability, for instruction to be inclusive and for instruction of students with poor attendance, develop multi-term or multiyear, multilevel modules to favour self-paced instruction skill and concept mastery. Include enrich material to slow the more gifted students while everyone else catches.

For instruction, teachers and mathematics education committees need to proactively collect and review ideas for not wait for others. Course design and delivery, and approval of materials or textbooks in secondary and even primary school mathematics should include university professors of mathematics, so that content gaps, inconsistencies and material that is not essential, your standard curriculum pitfalls, are flagged. Good intentions should defer to or combine with discipline knowledge.

The invention or collection of appetizers and lessons easily understood and followed in class is one way to make learning and teaching more effective. Some adjustment or variation will be needed for different cultures, different learning styles, in which students may be passive to active, cooperative to resistance, to instruction, voluntary to compelled. Modular course design may allow instruction to cope with multi-level classrooms and intermittent attendance. And where instructors may be given teaching assignments outside their zone of comfort or expertise, textbooks and modules easily understood and followed by students and teachers could provide a lower bound for education, and in place of complete confusion may allow first-time instructors in a discipline to be two pages ahead of students.

The question of how to develop skills and concepts, so the study of mathematics and logic seems purposeful and not endless remains open. Primary school and junior high school mathematics could provide practical drill and practice on geometric and quantitative figuring and measuring skills and concepts needed daily life at work, in the home and in buying and selling, while offering or providing a thought-based development. But skills and confidence may come from the mastery through rote or comprehensions of methods which give repeatable, reproducible and hence verifiable results. The direct and simple use of formulas, given if not derived, could be part of this wide ranging, preliminary and practical education. Saying and showing how to use measurement and mathematical methods in a repeatable and reproducible, and hence verifiable manner may be designed to help students who end their studies early while providing an invitation and a context for further studies. Ease of exposition and mastery would be the guide. Details how need to be determined.

Hope for benefits, but look for the limitations first in any reform, and then provide alternatives.

Mathematics Wars Resume or Continue

In North American states and provinces, educational authorities in their formal plans for primary and secondary mathematics instruction, distract from the question of what should be taught, the course content, through the use of general educational theories terms and assumptions from psychology and general theories of learning, and in addition, especially in Quebec and the rest of North America, through content description with terms strange or non-standard. While the plans call for the development of communication skills and critical thinking, the same plans are often unclear and overly complicated in content and direction. Obscurity appears to be a trademark of multi-author documents. In Canada and the rest of North America that tradition that is likely to continue in states and provinces, where mathematicians (retired professors with four or five decades of experience in instruction) are allowed no say in course design and delivery. Educational authorities elsewhere will provide a better model for instruction. See for instance, the Irish. Scottish and English national curricula. As a mathematics instructor, I want the content to explicitly and clearly defined, and illustrated by examples of what is meant or hope for, Gone are the days when a school or school board picked a book written by an expert, and said that is the curriculum. Instead, we have course design by committee and textbook approval by bureaucrats whose knowledge and comprehension of the discipline is not guaranteed.

Three Ways to be a Better Student

Three Ways to be a Better Instructor

4 Ways to Improve Education Reform

Hope for benefits, but look for the limitations first in any reform, and then provide alternatives.

Mathematics Wars Resume or Continue