Multiplication and Problem Solving The Effect of Misconceptions The Parameter of Team Teaching KALAITZIDIS IOANNIS Mathematics and its relevance in a global world: preparing children for the future. This topic was chosen because of two reasons: My team’s orientation in mathematics and the evaluation of mathematics as very important by the school. The team was consisted of four fifth grade teachers and two fourth grade. We undertook the pilot in four fifth grade classes.

Connections with Colleagues The formation of the team was goal oriented, therefore a minimum of willingness for cooperation was shared among the members of the team. The formation of a bigger group which was consisted of different grade level teachers (fifth and fourth grade) gave us the chance to listen different orientations. We have the chance to form our team on the base of our needs and our prior collaboration, therefore we were more open to apply new methods and techniques. We took consideration of our willingness to change and we included interpersonal forces. We have not evaluated before factors such as the teacher’s knowledge of different grade levels. We worked on the base of a team work protocol changing this way the dynamics of the usual team.

Successes The Team Planning worksheet ensured that the team used the meeting time effectively and allowed us to focus on instructional talk instead of spending our valuable time on logistics and discussions about operations. The nature of our team (two fourth grade teachers) allowed us to explore and evaluate many of the misconceptions of our students in multiplications, mainly because we knew exactly how they were thought multiplications in the context of problems. The Student Work Protocol ensured a good evaluation of students’ work helping us exploring all the thinking styles and schemata that our students used to solve the multiplications problems.

Challenges The work, that was carried out, was not part of an overall strategy for improvement. The new practice was only a small piece of change in the curriculum. It is difficult to have respectable improvement when you avoid changing many activities. The notion that experience equals expertise affected the results of our work. Members of my team opposed the idea of having in our team an educational psychologist helping us, this tendency restrained the use of problem solving techniques.

Next Steps I believe that this was the first time that my team have some thoughts and worked targeting the improvement of the team itself. For us this was a crucial step for being better teachers, however did not promote a working environment that generated trust and communication. I think that in our next experimentation we should have access to all available resources and enlist outside expertise, as well as we shall empowered to take risks.