Maximizing Learning to Meeting the Multicultural Learner

Mindfulness training might be the single easiest and cost-effective school effort to implement to support students. In a diverse environment like those found in schools on the island of Guam, combining multicultural education and mindfulness training could provide an effective and low-cost means to improve student outcomes. An agenda is proposed for a two-day professional development session incorporating mindfulness and multicultural offerings of community-centered literacy projects such as book clubs, virtual museums, library projects, and home-based literacy strategies using the sociolinguistic framework.

Math “Rules"” Prompt Reflection on Teachers' Identity

In a professional development session, teachers reflect on their mathematical practice following the reading of the MTMS article, “12 Math Rules that Expire.” The ideas in the article elicited teachers' awareness of mathematics that they emphasize in instruction and implications for student learning.

ContextualisingtheTeachingandLearningofMeasurementwithinTorres Strait Islander Schools

A one-year mathematics project that focused on measurement was conducted with six Torres Strait Islander schools and communities. Its key focus was to contextualise the teaching and learning of measurement within the students' culture, communities and home languages. Six teachers and two teacher aides participated in the project. This paper reports on the findings from the teachers' and teacher aides' survey questionnaire used in the first Professional Development session to identify: a) teachers' experience of teaching in the Torres Strait Islands, b) teachers' beliefs about effective ways to teach Torres Strait Islander students, and c) contexualising measurement within Torres Strait Islander culture, communities and home languages. A wide range of differing levels of knowledge and understanding about how to contextualise measurement to support student learning were identified and analysed. For example, an Indigenous teacher claimed that mathematics and the environment are relational, that is, they are not discrete and in isolation from one another, rather they interconnect with mathematical ideas emerging from the environment of the Torres Strait communities.

What Happens to Geometry on a Sphere?

WE HAVE TO SHARE THIS WITH OUR students! They will love it!” This statement was all we could think about after a professional development session dealing with geometry. Spherical geometry challenged our capabilities in geometry but greatly interested us. Before we could teach our students about spherical geometry, we needed to learn more about this strange new world ourselves. In this article, we describe our discoveries and some of the activities we developed for our sixth-grade students.