The Math “Wars” and Struggles over Content and Pedagogy
Read this university professor’s appeal to his academic math colleagues that elementary and secondary school teachers have their students learn arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and calculus through teachers organizing students to work collaboratively when doing math. The professor called it the “laboratory method.”
The laboratory method has … the flexibility which permits’ students to be handled as individuals or in groups. The instructor utilizes all the experience and insight of the whole body of students. He arranges it so that the students consider that they are studying the subject itself, and not the words, either printed or oral, of any authority on the subject. And in this study they should be in the closest cooperation with one another and with their instructor, who is in a desirable sense one of them and their leader.
Instructors may fear that the brighter students will suffer if encouraged to spend time in cooperation with those not so bright. But experience shows that just as every teacher learns by teaching, so even the brightest students will find
