Sharing Teaching Ideas: Less Is Sometimes More

Abstract

In 1998, the keynote speaker for the Virginia Council of Teachers of Mathematics Conference was Gail Burrill. I had read many of her articles and even used some of the materials in her books, but that occasion was the first time that I had heard her speak. During the talk, she described an elementary school classroom that was working on data collection and analysis. The teacher had not provided a template or worksheet for the students to use to collect the data, so they had to come up with their own formats. The teacher acted as a coach, walking around the room as the children counted pumpkins, leaves, and other objects and making suggestions, such as “How do you know which objects your tally marks represent?” The students had to decide how they should represent the objects and then how to present the data in a usable format. Burrill's point was that we sometimes give students too much structure and not enough real-world experience. In a work environment, no one hands employees a set of instructions with a worksheet to collect data and questions to assist in interpreting those data. Workers must design their own experiment as part of the process.