Global voices Japan: Good teaching goes global

The achievement disparities of low-income and minority children are similar around the world. But so are the good teaching practices that help them improve their scores.

“Sensei, kore wakarehen! Konnan douyatte surun?” Teacher, I don’t understand! How do you do this?

Having observed a high minority junior high school in Osaka, Japan, for the past seven years, I frequently encountered these energetic yet frustrated student voices. These responses and scenes were strikingly similar to what I often hear and see here in U.S. classrooms: “What are we doing here? When can we leave? Do we have to be here?” Disinterest. Unmotivated. Detached. These traits are pervasive in classrooms around the world. Similarly, I have found, so are those for good teaching.

So I invited two U.S. teachers with whom I have worked to share their perspectives and compare them with what I learned in Japan. We were part of a group of 10 preservice teachers who worked with English language learners (ELLs) in a school near Los Angeles. We worked in an after-school intervention program with students who had failed their 6th-grade math class or the standardized tests for that grade. Our goal was to bring them to grade level before they entered 7th grade. It was a high minority (89% Hispanic) and high ELL (43%) school. Only 16% of the students in the school met or exceeded California’s math standards, compared to 50% statewide.

Across the Pacific Ocean, more than 5,000 miles away, I observed a high minority junior high school in Osaka, where 30% to 40% of the school population is Buraku — a traditionally socially marginalized minority — while more than 10% of the students are recent immigrants. I spent time in the classroom of Mr. Kato, an 8th-grade mathematics teacher and baseball coach whose lifelong passion is to take his students to koshien, a prestigious annual high school baseball event that every male student dreams of attending. Kato connects math to his students’ everyday lives through stories, games, and manipulatives.

So far, yet so close

What do these two international contexts have in common? Although entirely different languages, cultures, and educational systems, I was struck by the transcendence of good teaching practices.

For example, changing student perceptions about mathematics is one of the most difficult tasks facing teachers on both sides of the Pacific. In my group in the U.S., instead of bombarding students with numbers, we had them experience the concept physically, outside the classroom, and through multisensory approaches.

Changing student perceptions about mathematics is one of the most difficult tasks facing teachers on both sides of the Pacific.

In one activity, we drew a chalk number line on the ground where students physically moved their bodies along the line to learn about integers. Students physically placed themselves at zero as the starting point and then moved right or left along the number line. We could then explain the concept of negative numbers more successfully when they referred back to their kinesthetic experience. Students learned that when seeing positive numbers they would move right on the number line and left for a minus sign. When subtracting a negative number, such as in the problem 4 – (-7), students were able to explain that they had to “turn twice.” Providing a meaningful experience like this before teaching the academic language and mathematical symbols gave students the conceptual understanding necessary to tackle more abstract mathematical concepts later.

Similarly, in Japan, rather than presenting the material as math problems to solve, Kato used a treasure hunt activity to teach X and Y coordinates. He began by giving them a map with directions to a treasure. “If you go to the right one step and up four steps, you will find the treasure,” the directions said. After going through another example, Mr. Kato gave his students a second map with Points A through F to hide their own treasure on the map and explain to their classmates where they hid it. His students discovered that they needed a starting point to even begin describing where they wanted to go. Then they were guided to hide their own treasure by applying what they had just learned. They eventually learned to express the location by calling the right/upper side “plus” and left/down side “minus” on the coordinate.

Sandwich vs. candy

Another hands-on activity that the U.S. teachers created was a tactile activity that taught the order of operations to do in solving math equations (PEMDAS — Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, and Subtraction) by making a sandwich. For example, teachers said, “First, we get the bread, then mayonnaise, then meat and cheese, and finally lettuce and tomatoes.” The teachers pushed the students to discover how these steps were connected to the concept of order in mathematics. “Why should you put the mayonnaise/mustard on the bread before the meat and cheese? Why does the order matter?” Students responded, “because if you don’t, the mayonnaise/mustard will come out when you eat the sandwich” or “because putting it after the meat and cheese will make the lettuce and tomatoes slip out, and you won’t have a sandwich.” The teachers explained that order or steps in which students made a sandwich matters, just as it does in mathematics. This combined the rigor of the mathematical concepts with another everyday application of order, something that we wanted the students to grasp.

Similarly, Kato used familiar snacks to teach linear equations with two variables. He presented students with the following scenario: five chocolate bars and three cookies cost 210 yen and five chocolate bars and eight cookies cost 310 yen. How much does a cookie and chocolate bar cost? The same number “five” for chocolate bars made an easy entry for students to find the cost of each cookie and chocolate. In the next step, the teacher provided slightly harder challenges with a different number for each snack — five chocolate bars and four cookies for 120 yen and two chocolate bars and two cookies for 56 yen. Since this question is more strenuous, the teacher prepared hints such as “When you buy two of the second set, you will find a new way to solve the problem!” Eventually, students figured out that by buying four chocolate bars and four cookies for 112 yen, one chocolate bar was 8 yen. The key in this activity is for students to become increasingly independent as Kato guides them, rather than simply handing out the information.

Results and lessons learned

At the end of the eight-week summer intervention program, we saw marked growth in the target 6th-grade mathematical concepts through pre- and post-test scores. Scores improved from 57% to 77% (basic operations), 36% to 70% (negative numbers), 57% to 84% (rate), and 55% to 97% (equations). Although there was gain across the board, the greatest areas of improvement were in the area of fractions from 24% to 69%, and word problems from 27% to 68%. In Japan, Kato’s 8th graders scored 45.9%, compared to the junior high school’s overall average of 39.9% in the Osaka standardized mathematics test.

These two examples of teaching minority students taught me an important lesson: Good teaching is indeed borderless. Although thousands of miles away, many approaches shared commonalities by providing real-life, hands-on examples and experiences that use multisensory approaches. In each setting, the teachers needed to rethink and reshape how they were teaching students in order to not only teach the required mathematics curriculum, but to help students discover the power of their own learning and take ownership of it. Encouraging students to be creative, however, needed to begin with the teachers. The creative process happened once teachers stopped relying on prescriptive textbooks and discussed what students needed to learn and how they would learn best.