Time for some PD

Sunday 22 February

Yesterday I discussed with Zangmo the preparedness of the students to get up on stage and perform and she confirmed that they are happy to do this, that they find it enjoyable, but speaking out in class is something they find difficult.  Do we have a tendency towards visual spatial thinkers, I wonder. 

Thinking more about this I recall that the weaving done by the women is all from memory, they follow no pattern, but recall patterns passed down from mother, aunt or older sisters and sometimes amend or create new patterns which are their own signature, patterns which, I was told when I visited Khoma in 2013, were closely guarded in the making.  That is definitely visual memory.

So, time to refresh myself and consider how I am going to incorporate visual spatial learning skills into a very linear maths curriculum.  I did not bring Linda Silverman’s book The Visual Spatial Learner in the Classroom  due to its bulk and weight, but I have several articles saved on my laptop by Linda and others who have learned from her initial work on this important topic and settle down to read.  This is going to involve some real work for me, as, despite Linda’s insistence, when she was my guest a couple of years ago during the Tasmanian Association for the Gifted state conference, that I am a visual thinker, I consider myself much more a linear sequential thinker and learner.

Linda’s article Teaching Mathematics to Non-Sequential Learners seems like a good place to start, and while it focuses on teaching of multiplication tables, has some thoughts I might be able to use – assuming I can persuade these reticent class 7 students that they can think for themselves.  I wonder if I am going to be able to do that if they are shy to speak to me and might be used to different, more traditional, teaching approaches.

The first topic for class 7, after revision of number, is divisibility rules, and while the textbook does have a pattern discovery approach, it is very text heavy – something that will not be of help to those students whose English is not strong, and it provides a number of sequential steps for the discovery process – which will defeat the “big picture” approach that works better for visual spatial learners.