‘Meet teachers where they’re at’: math educator calls for tailored approach amid certification debate

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This article was published 13/11/2024 (324 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As the debate over relaxed teacher certification requirements continues, one career educator is pitching an alternative formula to address math anxiety among education students and improve their future lessons.

As of last month, aspiring teachers are no longer required to specialize in an approved list of major or minor discipline areas, often dubbed “teachables,” at university.

Elementary teachers no longer need to obtain six university-level credit hours in a number of standalone subjects, either.

The regulatory updates, introduced to address workforce shortages and streamline the certification process, have sparked concerns about teacher confidence and preparedness, particularly in mathematics.

Gay Sul said she understands the panic and where it’s coming from, but requiring teachers-in-training to complete university math courses outside their faculty is “a Band Aid solution.”

“Pushing people to do higher level maths doesn’t address the gaps in their understanding,” said Sul, a math teacher in Winnipeg with expertise in coaching both post-secondary education students and in-service teachers.

The career teacher — who has seen math anxiety manifest in classrooms, lecture halls and during staff meetings — is a proponent of a model used within the faculty of education at the University of Victoria, her former employer.

During her tenure at the B.C. university in the ’90s, all individuals who wanted to work in kindergarten-to-Grade 8 classrooms had to complete a proficiency test on math content covered across elementary levels.

Students were then informed about any topics they had gaps in understanding and required to work independently through a series of related modules, Sul said.

She noted both the modules and a follow-up assessment had to be complete prior to graduation.

“What it does is it meets people where they’re at,” Sul said, adding ongoing math-related professional development is also critical for teachers once they are in the workforce.

In Sul’s experience, many students continue to struggle with “math facts” — knowing how-to do basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division involving and up to the No. 9 (9+9; 18-9; 9×9; and 81/9) – and teachers need support to intervene.

Last year, 36 per cent of Grade 3 students in English programs were meeting numeracy expectations for their level. Provincial data show that figure has increased only slightly over the last decade.

Citing concerns about lagging numeracy scores, critics of the recent certification amendments, including math professors and the Progressive Conservative Party of Manitoba, have called for their reinstatement.

Anna Stokke, a math professor at the University of Winnipeg, successfully lobbied the province to increase the minimum number of teacher credit hours in math content courses from three to six in 2015.

Stokke called the recent scrapping of that requirement altogether “the most alarming thing” she’s heard over the last 15 years she’s advocated for better math education.

The Manitoba Teachers’ Society is among the supporters of tweaks to certification processes at Manitoba Education, along with local faculties of education and the school boards’ association.

“The changes to teacher education do not de-emphasize the importance of math and language arts but are rather intended to refocus on how those, and every other subject, are taught,” Sandy Nemeth, president of the Manitoba School Boards Association, said in a statement.

Nemeth said all teachers will now be equipped to teach these subjects, which were previously listed as approved teachables, “rather than a select few.”

The changes give education programs flexibility to adjust their credit requirements and programming, although mandatory education courses on how-to teach math are expected to remain.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

Maggie Macintosh
Education reporter

Maggie Macintosh reports on education for the Free Press. Originally from Hamilton, Ont., she first reported for the Free Press in 2017. Read more about Maggie.

Funding for the Free Press education reporter comes from the Government of Canada through the Local Journalism Initiative.

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