TEAM

After some disappointing web searches the past couple of weeks, I was literally giddy to find the website I will discuss today. It’s not often that I read information geared towards teaching students with learning disabilities and think, wow, these people get it. The website for TEAM which stands for Teaching Enhanced Anchored Mathematics can be found here http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/TEAM/index.html The TEAM project is associated with the University of Wisconsin- Madison and I cannot do it justice in simply trying to describe it, but I will try. Under Projects and Funding, you can find a good summary of the research used to create this program. One particular sentence jumped out at me.
“…many teachers of low-achieving students are reluctant to teach challenging math problems before they have mastered basic skills, which often leads students to dislike mathematics and drastically reduces to their motivation to learn it.”
This could not be more true to my experience. Actually, my fellow coworker and I have long disagreed on how math should be taught. He believes students cannot advance to the next chapter or concept until they have mastered the first which leaves some 12 year olds working in a second grade math book on the addition chapter. The research from this program has identified instructional practices that make it possible to teach low achieving students to solve complex problems. The program accomplishes this by helping kids develop problem solving skills in a real world context. Now this seems intuitive but unfortunately it does not seem to be the norm in classrooms across this country. In fact, the latest TIMSS report from 2003 (the 2007 results won’t be available until late 2008) still show American math and science test score falling well behind other nations. (http://nces.ed.gov/timss/TIMSS03Tables.asp?Quest=3&Figure=5) So I have to ask why more schools aren’t taking this research into account when teaching kids math. Going back to the TEAM program, the instructional program developed by the researchers is called EAI which stands for Enhanced Anchored Instruction. EAI uses video based problems delivered by CD-ROM to help students complete what I would consider to be rather complex tasks. I loved how the researchers noted the importance of this sort of delivery system for students with reading disabilities. Having something that students can watch and listen to eliminates the barrier students with reading disabilities immediately encounter when opening any text book. I see this as a huge step. To get a real feel for the actual program, an example can be viewed here http://www.wcer.wisc.edu/TEAM/products.html I was disappointed that I could not get the video to load despite many attempts however the teacher’s manual provides a very detailed description of the video and the TEAM project offers teachers a free CD-ROM for use in the classroom. The only unfortunate thing about this program is that it was designed for middle schoolers so it is not something I can use for my own students but it is something that I know the middle school students at my school would really enjoy so I will be passing this information on to the middle school math teacher at my school.
I am thrilled to have found such an interesting program and I hope my continued searches are as successful. I am also pleased that I now have research to show kids can move past the basic skills and learn more complex ones that will not only have real world significance but also be more age appropriate than the current text books.