No More Fear, Frustration, and Failure in Teaching Fractions

I have met many teachers over the past few months and there is one constant in how educators initially respond to a product on fractions.
It comes disguised, though, in one of two reactions. The first is interest and joy at finding a solution to address their fractions shortcomings. The second is avoidance, often associated with a statement such as, "Oh, I hate teaching fractions.
" or "I was never good at fractions.
" Both reactions point to this one constant - the fear of, frustration with, and failure at teaching fractions.

Why is that? To begin with, many elementary and sometimes middle schools teachers are not fluent with fractions.

Deborah Ball found that teachers are considerably less confident and less successful in the area of rational numbers than they are in the domain of whole numbers (Ball and Mewborn, 2001).
Additionally, the work of Thomas Post and others from the Rational Numbers Project (Post et al.
, 1991) lead them to discover that "many of the same misunderstandings and 'naive conceptualizations' that we have identified in youngsters also are prevalent among teachers.

" I certainly found this to be true when I taught a math methods course to undergraduate students at a university. Many of my students had no intention of teaching math; however, many of them ended up doing just that.
For teachers who are strong mathematically and with fractions, teaching fractions can still be a frustrating experience. They report that students' lack the foundations or "fraction sense.

" Others use instructional methods used when they were students that focuses on recalling rules and steps to procedures with little understanding of the concepts behind the procedures.
How do we help teachers teach fractions? How do we address the feelings of fear, frustration, and failure associated with teaching fractions? We need to help teachers develop both their content knowledge and their instructional methodology.
Mewborn and Cross found that the teacher's perspective on what mathematics is determines his/her approach to teaching. This can certainly be extended to the area of fractions.

If the teacher's perspective is that fractions are difficult, confusing, and rules-based, instruction often follows a rules based approach.
If he/she was taught that learning fractions is to learn a set of procedures, then he/she will most likely teach fractions as a set of procedures.

If the teacher is not confident in his/her understanding of fractions, then the likelihood of math discussions and open-ended problems being part of instruction is low.
Since research indicates that teachers' knowledge of fractions influences their instruction, it is important that we create opportunities for teachers to develop their own personal understanding of fractions and the pedagogy.
Professional development time is often hard to come by. Even with an increased awareness of the need to improve math instruction, funding and time is scarce. Therefore, as a community we need to be creative in how we provide ongoing training and support.
When traditional professional development is not possible, we can support teacher development by providing opportunities to strengthen content knowledge, sharing instructional strategies, and reflecting on student performance. Provide opportunities that develop content knowledge and pedagogy by: Providing curricular supports: Providing materials that outline and support math discussions Providing instructional materials that are universally designed so they do not need to retrofit instruction to meet the needs of all their students Providing easily outlined suggestions for differentiation Providing support for assessing results of formative assessments Providing materials that develop pedagogical content knowledge such as: Materials that explain why something works along with the how to do it Descriptions of possible student thinking, student work samples Explanations of common misconceptions that are made by students In her interactions with teachers, Judith Sowder found that elementary teachers often initially underestimate the difficulty of the content.
"When they begin to view the curriculum conceptually, many of these teachers recognize that not only is the curriculum more difficult than they had realized, but also that they themselves have not had opportunities to learn the mathematics they are expected to teach.

" Understanding and fluency with fractions is a critical mathematical skill. The good news is that research indicates that when teachers are provided with opportunities to develop a deep understanding of fractions, they become more confident and their teaching changes.

It is important that we think creatively and provide teachers with opportunities to reason about fractions as well as opportunities to build confidence and the expertise to teaching fractions so that their students benefit.