Chapter 3: Beyond Individual Classrooms: Opening Collaborative Spaces For Teaching And Learning Mathematics

It was not until Donna and I were well into creating a cooperative forum for our classes’ learning of mathematics that we realized the value this venture held in terms of the unique opportunities it offered to our second and third grade students and, to us as teachers. We were inspired by the notion of “connecting children with their mathematics,” and it was this idea which became the theme for our program. We focused our work on establishing interactive learning spaces that not only emphasized the children’s conceptual connections with mathematics (Ministry of Education, 1995; NCTM, 2000) inside each of our own classrooms, but also, connections that would grow between the two classes and amongst the children as they worked together as one collective group. Secondly, since the program was to be centered on the children’s mathematical interactions, we also saw it to be a natural context for student-generated problem posing (Silver, 1994; Walter & Brown,1993) and problem solving projects.