Mathematics Education – Where are we headed?

(This is the first blog post in a series of three blog posts examining where we are with respect to Mathematics education and what we can do additionally. In this blog post, I present my views on what is needed for enhancing Mathematics education and what is it that we are providing for addressing this need.)

To begin with, let us look at what makes students like/good at Mathematics…

We all know that Mathematics is a subject liked by some students and hated/feared by others. Students who love Mathematics get hooked onto it. Often, they devote a lot of their spare time studying the subject (sometimes at the cost of other subjects). They like being introduced to new concepts and enjoy grappling with problems involving these concepts. Such students become the subject of envy (often, in higher classes) for the way they solve complex problems. 

Many factors are no doubt at play in building a liking for Mathematics, not the least of them being a natural flair for the subject and being exposed to an awesome teacher or an awesome resource (textbook, reference book, a series of videos etc.) at an early stage. 

Can we make more of this available? Are we doing that?

We all know that as things stand today, getting exposed to a truly awesome teacher who has the patience and passion to create an amazing learning experience for students is sometimes a matter of chance/luxury. Creating a pool of such teachers to take care of facilitating Mathematics (or for that matter any subject) education for the entire human population is a Herculean task by itself. Lot needs to change for this to become a reality.  l would not like to venture into this aspect (at least not in this blog post) and will keep my focus on the awesome resources part instead. (With the hope that probably availability of awesome resources may alleviate the issue of non-availability of awesome teachers to some extent.:-))

Luckily for the current generation of students, advancements in digital technologies coupled with the availability of high speed Internet, content hosting platforms, search engines and social media technology has greatly facilitated the creation, delivery & discovery of Mathematics learning resources. Resource creation and publishing is no longer confined to big established education companies; startups and individuals have also joining the bandwagon. Consequently, more learning resources are being churned out at a greater speed than ever before.

Are we solving the problem?

No doubt, the proliferation of high quality resources is a welcome phenomenon. But it has created its own set of challenges, a couple of the obvious ones being:

• Who will identify the right resources amongst the plethora of choices available, for use by students? 
• Who will guide students in using these resources? 

Before we examine the first challenge, let us look at why this is an issue in the first place. It is clear that while some of the resources out there are of exceptional quality, many others don’t really differentiate themselves greatly from others. When there is a plethora of choices available, identifying the best from the ordinary is by no means a simple task. 

Let us now look at the obvious ways in which we can identify the right resources.

Let us begin with students. Students need to be highly mature, motivated and have a flair for the subject, to be able to make an intelligent choice amongst the available resources. We know that not every student is equipped for this task, especially in early stages of learning. So, we can rule out the students.

Next come the parents. Parents are either too busy or lack the necessary background to make the choice and guide their children in using the resources. And anyway, most parents think that this is the job of the schools. So, we can rule out parents as well.

Coming to the next obvious choice, namely schools, they have a mandate to keep on top of the syllabus as defined by the education board that they are affiliated to and hence, naturally tend to choose resources recommended by the board and aligned with the syllabus. Moreover, most teachers have their hands full dealing with the syllabus and examinations, and don’t really have the luxury of choosing from/experimenting with resources given the massive amount of resources out there. 

The next obvious choice is the education board. The education board, in a sense, sets the direction for education at the level of a whole state or country. This is a huge responsibility per se, and not an easy one. While the board sets a framework (in terms of the syllabus and examinations) and makes broad recommendations within the context of this framework, they may neither have the necessary bandwidth to examine individual resources and recommend specific ones for consumption by schools nor would they want to appear rigid by mandating all schools to follow a standard set of resources. After all, too much standardisation can result in the curtailing of creativity at the level of individual schools.

As we can see, this is not an easy challenge to address. In spite of all this, we do come across some schools who invest in examining various resources and adopting some really awesome resources for the benefit of their students. (The irony, very often, is that such schools anyway have awesome teachers to begin with.)

Given all this, resource creators in their bid to stay relevant and to increase their reach, may end up aligning the resources that they create to the framework set by the board (and used by the schools). After all, a resource that supplements Mathematics learning within the adopted framework may find more acceptability than one which complements the current learning process, but doesn’t fit into the framework. Consequently, although new age resources may make use of the current technology advancements, they can potentially become glorified avatars of traditional resources, with the technology only aiding the delivery of the resources to the children and not impacting learning at a fundamental level.

Coming to the second challenge (namely, guiding the students in using the resources), we know that making use of an awesome resource without being guided by a teacher (a.k.a. self learning), requires natural flair, motivation and maturity (and not all students possess these qualities). And we also know that the issue of lack of awesome teachers is not going to vanish anytime soon. Realising this, resource creators are using technology to define lesson plans and testing methodologies in a bid to create a learning environment with minimal intervention by teachers. But in spite of their best efforts, we are far far away (fortunately!) from a world where the need for awesome teachers would go away. However, I see technology playing a part in moving the teacher’s role to that of a facilitator facilitating the learning process using awesome resources (assuming we manage to tackle the issue of how to create the ecosystem required for creating truly awesome resources that impact learning at a fundamental level).

Where do we go from here?

In my opinion, although there is a proliferation of Mathematics learning resources, the majority of available resources don’t impact learning at a fundamental level. If we really want to create a fundamental shift in Mathematics education in such a way that majority of our students start liking/become good at Mathematics, we need to ask ourselves the question – “What needs to change fundamentally in our approach towards teaching/learning Mathematics?”. If we are able to answer this question and bring about a shift in our approach (maybe incrementally), we will go a long way in our objective.  Of course, we will need learning resources to support any shift in approach and resource creators have an important role to play for this to happen. However, key players (other than resource creators) in the entire ecosystem, would also need to take the lead to realise any shift in approach.

To look at how our approach towards learning Mathematics needs to change, we need to look at the current approach and what is missing in this approach. I attempt to take a look at this aspect in the second blog post of this three post series.