After watching Liping Ma video about regrouping and reading a bit of her book, Knowing and Teaching Mathematics," it is clear that she really knows great methods of teaching math. She displays a chart in the video that shows American teachers vs Chinese teachers when it comes to teaching "regrouping" or "borrowing" methods. It shows that in American, teachers tend to use the vocabulary "borrowing" when teaching subtraction of 2 or more digit numbers. In China, teachers primarily use the word "regrouping" when teaching the same concept. She states that in China teachers emphasize that students are simply "renaming" the number, not borrowing. She further shows that American teachers typically teach one way of doing subtraction whereas teachers in China show many ways of teaching this concept.
Of course we hear all the time to provide multiple ways of teaching a concept. In yet statistics show that American teachers as a whole as just not doing it. This video and reading has definitely opened my eyes to different ways we can teach this one concept in our classroom to make it easiest for the students to learn. For example, Liping Ma demonstrated how to regroup numbers into smaller numbers that will be easy for the students to subtract. Such as regrouping the number 53 into 40, 10, and 3. Smaller, whole numbers that students can easily work with.
It all makes sense to teachers I'm sure, but maybe they find there is not time or wiggle room in the curriculum for teaching all these different methods. I feel that it is a necessity that students are provided multiple learning tools for solving a problem. It is also very interesting to me that a simply vocabulary word change can make such a difference in student's learning. What do you typically use when/if you teach this concept in your classrooms? Borrowing or regrouping?
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