Different schools and different teachers started working on CAN in
different ways. The headteacher of one school has described in detail
how it started there:
- Before the work began there were a
couple of terms of thinking and discussion within the school and
with the project team. We had been using calculators with children
for four or five years, and my feeling was that it would be an
extension of what we were doing already. That turned out to be
quite wrong.
The teachers at this school decided that they would not 'instruct'
the children on the use of the calculator, but that they would always
answer direct questions from the children. At first, nothing much
seemed to be happening:
- Normal good practice was continuing
as we had agreed that it should, and non-number aspects of maths
were unchanged. The children were obviously very attracted by the
bright red and blue calculators with their slide-on covers
(CCh comment: MathMate calculators
are a later development and are red and yellow). They loved having their very own machine, and
they proudly carried them about everywhere, sitting them on the
table even when they were reading or writing a story. It was
noticeable that the calculators showed up in a lot of their
paintings at this time.
The class teacher made use of this interest, suggesting that
children should make junk model calculators. She encouraged the
children to look closely at the way the numbers were arranged on the
keypad, so that they could get their models right. They also made
number-lines with matchsticks on black sugar paper, using the digital
number shapes.
Gradually the calculator began to be used in number work, but not
in the way the teachers had expected. The head continued:
- I recall watching one child with a
large piece of paper, some Multilink cubes and a calculator. The
paper was blank but the calculator displayed 7714. I was not
immediately able to relate the child's actions, pushing cubes
backwards and forwards and counting them, to the number on the
display. So I asked her what she was doing. "I'm making 14, all
different ways." "And does this help?" I asked, picking up the
calculator. "Oh yes, it helps you to remember what you are doing -
look, it says 7 and 7 make 14."
For some time the children used the calculator as an electronic
notebook, to remind them of the numbers they were using. Gradually
they found out, and showed each other, that you could use the
calculator to give you the answer to sums you hadn't worked out for
yourself. A child said to the head:
- "Look! Five add one makes ... six,
right? [Doing it] But you can put in FIVE HUNDRED add one! See!
What number is that?"
- "It's 501, and that's how you write
it."
- "Wow!"
The class teacher became very enthusiastic about the children's
conversations, and felt that their thinking was developing rapidly.
Later in the year, the head overheard two children arguing about the
number displayed on a calculator.
- "It says ten thousand."
- No, it's a hundred
thousand."
- "TEN thousand. Look - divide by two.
What do you get?"
- "Oh ... five thousand. You're
right."
The headteacher continued to reflect:
- I started to realise that, far from
being a continuation of our previous work, CAN was a direct
challenge to it, forcing some difficult and uncomfortable
questions upon us.
The teachers at this school had not previously questioned the good
primary practice that they were trying to carry out. The head listed
some aspects of their good primary practice:
- Proceed from the known to the unknown
- Make everything concrete
- Don't force abstraction on children at an early age
But the children in the project were forcing their teachers to
reconsider these beliefs:
These children seemed to be overleaping the need for apparatus,
using it only to demonstrate or explain their thinking. They went
determinedly in abstract directions, experimenting with all the
buttons on all the numbers they could think of. We didn't have
millions of Multilink cubes, and the children wouldn't have bothered
with them of we had.
- We recognise that a lot of the power
that was being generated was because the children had a large
measure of control over the content of what they did.
