The AMTE Standards for Preparing Teachers of Mathematics call for well-prepared beginners to be able to “enhance teaching through collaboration with colleagues, families, and community members” (Indicator C.2.5, Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, 2017, p. 17). Developing this competency through a traditional four-year undergraduate program can be challenging given the significant amount of content knowledge and classroom practice pre-service teachers (PSTs) must master in a limited amount of time. One solution is to involve PSTs in opportunities outside the formal education credentialing curriculum. Another is to integrate community collaborations into coursework in small, sustainable ways. As in micro-teaching, micro community collaborations provide PSTs with opportunities to practice or observe specific, discrete components of collaborating with families and community partners with the complexity reduced. These collaborations can be sites of learning for children, caregivers, practicing teachers, and teacher educators as well.
This article describes three activities where pre-service elementary and middle school teachers participated either as volunteers or through their coursework in STEM education activities that involved schools, families, and community partners, which might be sites of micro collaborations in a similar way. The first is a Family Math Night. The second is a series of Family Coding Nights. The third is a field trip bringing children to a college campus.
Previous Research
Impact of Pre-service Teachers’ Interactions with Children
Activities that give pre-service teachers opportunities to engage with children’s mathematical thinking have been shown to impact PSTs’ content knowledge and beliefs about teaching and learning mathematics. Structured activities with real children have a greater impact than classroom observation (Philipp et al., 2007).
Impact of College Visits on Children
Swanson and colleagues (2021) conducted a multi-site randomized control experiment about the impact of college visits on children. Eighth graders who attended three college visits had greater increases in their knowledge about college and intention to attend college. The visits also impacted their college-preparatory behavior, including enrollment in ninth grade courses and discussions with school personnel about attending college. Students may be more able to envision themselves attending college when they visit a campus, talk with college representatives, and participate in college activities.
Block-Based Visual Coding
Scratch is freely-available, web-based platform that uses block-based visual computer coding (BVC). BVC reduces barriers, such as spelling, syntax, and recall of commands because users drag blocks into a coding area rather than typing the terms directly. A meta-analysis found that BVC improved K-12 student learning and affective outcomes in mathematics and computer science (Yu et al., 2024). Qualitative studies indicate that the task itself matters. Projects that are difficult, tedious, and prescriptive can result in negative impacts on students’ perception of mathematics and coding, whereas, when students are allowed to tinker with existing games, they report a positive experience (Dohn, 2020). This suggests that simpler game structures that allow customization may be an important part of the experience for students.
Family Engagement
Family engagement in children’s education has positive relationships with children’s success and persistence in mathematics and their self-perception of their own mathematical ability (Epstein et al., 2018). Hornby and Lafaele (2011) identified barriers to family involvement. One of the barriers was caregivers’ lack of confidence in their academic skills to support their child’s learning. This may be exacerbated by recent changes to curriculum that focus more on reasoning and representations, such as ten frames and bar diagrams, that may be unfamiliar to adults. Another barrier to participation in school events is childcare. Programs described in this piece aim to address such barriers.
The Projects
All three projects were identified by community stakeholders: the children’s librarian, the school principal, and PTO (Parent-Teacher Organization) leadership. Two of the projects described here aimed to increase parents’ abilities and opportunities to engage children in STEM activities outside of the school day in three ways: (1) providing support in learning a computer coding platform, (2) providing children with math games to play at home and giving them experiences using those games so that they could teach family members, and (3) supporting parents to productively engage with their children’s mathematical thinking by increasing their pedagogical content knowledge and presenting an orientation toward reasoning and curiosity about children’s thinking. All of the projects provided opportunities for pre-service teachers to participate and learn, as described in the following section.
Activity 1: Family Mathematics Night at Elementary School: At a diverse elementary school 30 minutes from campus, a college mathematics education professor, the district elementary STEM coordinator, and the school math coach organized a math night for families to learn more about the mathematics that their children would study in elementary school. While the professor presented to parents and caregivers, children played and created familiar games with mathematical twists and evergreen mathematics games with four PSTs. Evergreen games are games with content that can be adjusted as children grow older. Familiar games with mathematical twists included Chutes and Ladders with the squares arranged in a hundred chart and Battleship with numerical coordinates. Evergreen games included Kapow, where students draw two popsicle sticks with numbers from a cup and then compute with a given operation, which can change as students age. The aim of the game is to collect the most popsicle sticks by computing correctly, but the sticks labeled “kapow” result in all of the sticks turned back into the cup.
Twenty-six families attended. Through this experience, pre-service teachers (1) learned a set of evergreen games to play with children, (2) interacted with children in a social setting, (3) listened to children’s mathematical thinking, (4) observed parents from a variety of backgrounds invested in their children’s education as parents entered and exited the event, and (5) saw an example of a family engagement event.
Activity 2: Scratch Coding for Kids & Their Grown Ups Nights at Library: At a public library in a diverse suburb, the author and one PST hosted seven evening sessions to show families how to use Scratch to create video games and animations while learning computer coding concepts. Through experimentation in Scratch, children can explore a variety of mathematical concepts, such as angle measures, percentages, and signed numbers. The library events used materials adapted from Wainewright’s printed books and interactive ebooks (Wainewright, 2019, 2024). Many for-profit coding-for-kids organizations are expensive, do not provide parents opportunities to learn so that they can support their child at home, and use proprietary software that can only be accessed at the organization’s site. At the library events, each session was at capacity, demonstrating a real interest among families for young children to learn coding. The PST had opportunities to learn (1) how to use Scratch coding, (2) how to troubleshoot with learners and parents, and (3) how to interact with families.
Wainewright’s ebooks provide students with a partially built game accessible through a weblink and PIN. The background is already created, and the coding blocks are pre-selected and placed on the coding area. Students use problem-solving to order the code and then can customize the game by adding additional sprites or changing values for different parameters. In this way, the difficulty has been lowered while the ability to tinker and customize has been increased. Some students customized the games so that ballerinas moved through space instead of rocket ships; others changed parameters to values that made the games unplayable, such as sending sprites at extremely high speeds across the screen, but they delighted in their creations.
Activity 3: Field Trip to Campus: Three fifth-grade classes from the same elementary school, along with their teachers and school and district administrators, came to campus to participate in three STEAM activities facilitated by college professors and pre-service teachers around the theme of light. The instructor of the Physical Science for Teachers course and his pre-service teachers facilitated experiments with colored laser pointers and gummy bears to explore color perception. A professor of visual arts facilitated a project using light with reflective and translucent materials. The author, a mathematics teacher educator, facilitated activities with hinged mirrors and kaleidoscopes to explore reflections. The instructor of Life Sciences for Teachers and a mathematics professor teaching Algebra for Teachers brought their PSTs to work with small groups of fifth graders during the event. Two other teacher educators also joined the activities. Survey results and debriefing conversations indicated that it was an enjoyable learning experience for the fifth graders, the pre-service teachers, the visiting practicing teachers, and the teacher educators themselves. Fifth graders reported that they enjoyed seeing a college campus, talking with college students and professors, and learning new things in different ways. Pre-service teachers reported that they enjoyed seeing kids’ faces as they learned something new. District administrators reported that the experience benefited teachers to be able to see different types of lessons. Teacher educators got the opportunity to listen to fifth graders’ thinking, to see how fifth graders interact with activities, and to see their pre-service teachers working with young people. For teacher educators who have not taught in K-8 classes or who have been away from the K-8 classroom for a long time, these opportunities to continue to learn how children think are important.
Discussion
Though organized by the author, with assistance from community partners and colleagues, the events themselves were identified by the community stakeholders: the children’s librarian, school principal, and PTO leadership. They served a perceived need in the community. Yet the benefit to the pre-service teachers and teacher educators for their own professional learning and engagement was equally significant. Like the activities described by Swanson and colleagues, the events described in this paper primarily used existing resources or required only small amounts of additional resources. For instance, the field trip occurred during pre-service teachers’ existing class time. For Code Nights and Math Night, the hours of volunteer commitment were minimal: 1-2 hours a month or less. A subscription to Max Wainewright’s Scratch ebooks and the cost of the bus for the field trip were paid for through the college professional development funds, though the PTO and district office offered to cover future expenses, once they witnessed the value to the community as voiced by students, teachers, and parents. While deep, long-term partnerships with early embedded field experiences may be beneficial, smaller efforts and one-time events can be more manageable for faculty with full course loads and pre-service teachers with busy schedules while still providing opportunities to engage with children and caregivers’ thinking and witness methods of engaging with the community. These projects also support AMTE’s second 2024-2028 goal, “to support and provide guidance on the high-quality preparation … of mathematics teachers across the variety of educational spaces” (Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators, 2024)
Acknowledgments
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Curry College Dean's Fund; the support of Curry College faculty and staff Dr. Sandor Kadar, Dr. Giordana Basta, Professor Julie Martini, Dr. Jennifer McNally, Dr. Steven LeMay, Professor Beth Champagne, Ms. Michelle Cremins, and Ms. Kathleen Miller; the teachers and administrators of Stoughton Public Schools, especially Ms. Eileen Sprague and Mr. Jake Dore; and Stoughton librarian Ms. Amy Dean.
References
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