COLLABORATIVE APPROACHES FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING GEOMETRY

Abstract

As a mathematics teacher at the secondary level, I have been facing various problems in my teaching profession. In my teaching experience, many students showed disinterest and low satisfaction with mathematics learning. They were studying mathematics because it was a compulsory subject at school. In this sense, most of the students tried to memorize various mathematics problem solving and concepts. I tried such practices in my teaching as well. But, very few students were successful in the learning process. The result of such a scenario would lead the majority of the students as poor achievers in mathematics subjects. The major causes of such problems occurred from our daily teaching and learning strategies that would focus on less engagement of students, hesitation in participation in classroom tasks and group discussion. In that scenario, I have planned to solve the problems of my students who were facing such problems in their mathematics learning. It was the result of observation of changes in the perception of students in mathematics learning through collaborative teaching and learning approach which was guided by two perceptions; constructivism theory and collaborative learning approach under the paradigm of interpretivism. In the classroom implementation, I made a complete action plan for 18 days. I developed the plans including mathematical contents such as a similar and congruent triangle, relation between the area of parallelograms and triangles, geometry circle, etc. Thereafter, I applied such action plans in Grade-X of a private school in Kathmandu valley through an action research method. The research embraced collaborative teaching and learning approach as an appropriate pedagogy for engaged learning. In the meantime of implementing an eighteen days action plan, I collected students' perceptions in mathematics learning for a couple of weeks, taking interviews with the four key participants, maintaining daily field notes and writing my own reflection. The collaborative learning approach is focused on students' engagement in the learning process to provide equal opportunities for sharing their knowledge and understanding. Therefore, this study highlighted how the collaborative approach helped my students to understand geometrical concepts in a meaningful way. I conclude that collaborative approaches help the students to challenge their underlying beliefs about mathematics as a difficult subject and make them more responsible and accountable for what they discussed during their learning process. Moreover, the results showed that the collaborative approaches are more helpful to make the active engagement of students through pair/group discussion, questioning, concept mapping and shared knowledge.