Ensinar e aprender matemática

: refletindo sobre um percurso, em busca de novos horizontes

Abstract

With this report, I intend to reflect in a critical way about my professional career of sixteen years. I taught in many different schools with different social-economic situations, so my teaching practices always implicated a special attention to the identified difficulties of each school, creating room for improvement possibilities in various pedagogic methods that could potentially help change or improve my work as a teacher as my goal was to help assure my students a learning maths experience. It is recognized that mathematics is essential because it helps us understand our reality. It is present in all of our human knowledge domains that are necessary for the integrated development of a human person. Mathematics teaches us to think, to reflect and it helps us answer numerous problems in which we are confronted everyday in our contemporary time. Without the understanding of mathematic knowledge it is impossible to acquire concepts, techniques and algorithms that allow us to resolve problems. A good maths student is capable of producing questions and finding answers based on different perspectives of reality and finding within the mathematic rules a graceful simplicity. Mathematic contents are all connected and are all accumulative, in other words, it is necessary that students develop from the elementary concepts to the more complex concepts and simultaneously develop the capability of executing the rules and the abstract techniques that were taught so that students can apply them in concrete situations in a creative form. Despite the development of maths teaching, there are still persistent difficulties in learning maths where some students address the subject, its rules and techniques in an inflexible state. However, schools making an effort for students to learn and the divulgation of the subject have allowed demystify some of this inflexible vision. In collaboration between the ministry department of education and mathematic teachers, we were able to motivate and develop a culture of using the logic of maths. In this regard, I consider that the success of students in maths depend not only on my pedagogic and scientific skills, but also on students gratification in learning and society in general. My experience as a maths teacher made me think about how to motivate students in order for them to learn maths; how to have discipline students in the classroom; how to promote self-regulation in maths students learning methods and how to involve students’ parents in this learning process. This assignment allowed me to re-evaluation my pedagogic practices, which led me to conclude that to be an effective teacher, to reach new prospects, it is necessary to follow a path in direction to the future, but taking into account that it is also fundamental to know our students as a whole, we should give feedback to our students after activities, provide them challenging and achievable activities and build a relationship of affectivity.

Date of Award	27 Feb 2013
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Maria Raul Xavier (Supervisor) & Luísa Mota Ribeiro (Co-Supervisor)