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Columns::April 15, 2002
The Golden Arch
Two-day statewide symposium highlights undergraduate research
Magazine ranks business, law, education among nation’s best
Four candidates for deanship to visit campus
Annual children’s literature conference opens April 18
Charleston mayor to discuss downtown preservation
Team-building ‘eggs-cellence’
Testing the waters
Making media a method
Rick Watson, MIS professor, named Internet Strategy chairholder
Newsmakers
In the swim
Campus News
Teaching students is ‘elementary’ for mathematics education prof
By Michael Childs
mchilds@coe.uga.edu
When Paola Sztajn is not teaching UGA elementary education students how to teach mathematics, she can usually be found
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| Paola Sztajn is currently working with local teachers to understand how they construct their knowledge through their careers. (Photo by Peter Frey) |
collaborating with mathematics teachers in local elementary schools.
Sztajn loves teaching. That much is obvious. A big smile spreads across the face of the Brazilian native as she talks about teaching.
“First--when you teach, you learn. I learn a lot through teaching,” she says. “More specifically--and this may sound idealistic, but I really believe it--I’d like to see better schools. And to improve schools, we need better teachers. We have very good teachers now, but we need to have even better teachers tomorrow.”
Sztajn was well on her way to a career in physics nearly 20 years ago in Brazil, when she decided that she really wanted teach mathematics.
“It took me a long time to realize that,” she says. “By then, I had a master’s degree in physics. But I had been working with math all that time. When I tutored, it was in mathematics. My scholarships were in mathematics. I loved physics and studying how things work, but it struck me that a lot of people couldn’t even add, subtract, multiply or divide.”
Sztajn’s current research focuses on teachers’ knowledge. She works with local teachers trying to understand how they construct their knowledge through their careers.
“I want to know what things they learned, how they learned them, what they value as important,” she says. “I want to understand the nature of this knowledge they have constructed through years and years of practice.”
Sztajn and one of her colleagues, Dorothy White, are working with teachers at Chase Street Elementary School in a year-long project funded by a $51,890 grant from the Eisenhower Higher Education program, a U.S. Department of Education initiative. The two have formed a “mathematics education community” in which Chase Street teachers get together, discuss what is happening in their math classes and share ideas.
As part of Project SIPS (Support and Ideas for Planning and Sharing in Mathematics Education), the school has formed a “mathematics leadership team” comprising one teacher from each grade level, the gifted education teacher and the special education teacher. The team helps teachers identify content and instructional areas within the mathematics curriculum which need support and uses that information to help create a mathematics teaching plan for the school.
The collaboration has been so successful that they have been approved for a second Eisenhower grant.
“It was very cool. We took a vote of the teachers about a second year because we didn’t want to impose on them, and it received heavy support,” says Sztajn with a big smile. “I think they were listening!”
In SIPsII, teachers will continue to be involved in grade-specific professional development work sessions and monthly mathematics faculty meetings. Teachers will also have weekly help from a mathematics resource specialist assigned to the school and opportunities to observe each other teach, followed by debriefing with mathematics educators.
“I know one year of work seems like a lot--but it is really not when we’re talking of changing a whole culture about school mathematics,” says Sztajn. |
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