Elephant Delta day 1 – Dr Harry Wiggins from The University of Pretoria: Are we leaving some mathematics students starved and bored in class?
Blogging from The Tenth Southern Hemisphere Conference on the Teaching and Learning of Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics
Dr Harry Wiggins – University of Pretoria (http://www.up.ac.za/en/mathematics-and-applied-mathematics/article/1942109/mr-hz-harry-wiggins)
Live blogging: Note that these are notes I’ve taken live, but will edit this today into a more readable format. I want to put this up straight away though to see if I have any obvious misunderstanding. Equations will also be put into more readable format ASAP.
The problem:
How should we teach a mixed ability class?
Children already come to us differentiated. It just makes sense that we would differentiate our instruction in response to them (Tomlinson 1999)
We teach with an average student in mind.
Our teaching is content driven, and we don’t take our students into account.
Unfortunately (sometimes) – this leaves the academically strong students starved and bored in class.
Academically stronger students face a higher level of boredom at school than their peers.…