Parents and Mathematics Education Reform Parents as Learners
The mathematics education reform movement calls on mathematicians and the educational community to bring forth substantial change in mathematics education. To ensure success, the mathematics education reform movement must also embrace the constructive and informed participation of parents. It is important to consider both how parents come to understand the changes in mathematics content and, also, the particular issues parents wrestle with in order to make sense of and support a new vision of what it means to learn.
Just as teachers come to mathematics learning with their beliefs and ideas about practice tied to their own previous experiences, parents bring their own school histories and beliefs to their role in children's education. Understanding parents' beliefs and assumptions about learning is critical to communicating with and empowering families. It is possible for parents to actively support and enhance the mathematics education reform movement if they first have opportunities to engage directly in mathematics and in the analysis of children's ideas. It is possible for parents to immerse themselves in the central ideas of the mathematics curriculum and reconstruct understanding through inquiry into mathematics. Parents, just as teachers, can come to appreciate the complexities and richness of children's developing mathematical ideas - if they are poised to listen carefully and with curiosity.
An important tool for parent learning and learning about parents' ideas is the Developing Mathematical Ideas (DMI) professional development curriculum. The materials were designed to help participants think through the major ideas of elementary-school mathematics and examine how children develop those ideas. While originally developed as a professional development course for teachers, a version of this same seminar has been offered for parents of elementary school age children.
The curriculum is based on a series of cases written by teachers which describe children's mathematical thinking and highlight teachers' efforts to learn from and understand ways children make sense of mathematics. In addition to reading the cases and working together to understand the issues at hand, participants have rich opportunities to work on mathematics through a variety of activities connected to each set of cases. As a course for parent education, the DMI curriculum proves to be a powerful tool for helping parents understand the mathematics their children encounter in elementary school. In addition, cases can be an important vehicle for eliciting parents' beliefs about the nature of learning, helping parents reconnect and re-examine their own school histories, and for supporting images of new classroom cultures.
Throughout the course, parents reconnect with their own schooling, with perceptions of themselves in regard to their abilities in mathematics, and with the emotions that accompany these reflections. Parents work through math problems, analyzing each other's strategies and ideas while coming to discover that they too, have ideas about number and ideas about how numbers behave on which they can build greater understanding. Parents learn to listen to the other parents in the seminar, to their children, and to themselves. The DMI seminar offers parents the opportunity to discover their own ideas about math, recognize that all parents in the seminar have developing ideas and that their children also have mathematical ideas with which a parent can engage. This experience, this climate, is one in which a parent can thoughtfully examine his or her beliefs about the teaching and learning of mathematics.
The DMI seminar has been conducted for parents of children attending two independent schools. In the school year 1998 - 1999, the seminar will be offered in an urban setting for parents of children in public and pilot schools. "Learning to Listen: Lessons from a Mathematics Seminar for Parents", an article written by DMI seminar facilitators, Amy Morse and Polly Wagner, appeared in the February '98 focus issue of Teaching Children Mathematics.