The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences ( AIMS) Ghana has trained over four hundred and fifty teachers in the area of mathematical sciences.
The objective of AIMS Ghana as a UNESCO Category II Center of Excellence is to provide training and professional development in Mathematical Sciences for high school teachers across Africa.
The annual conference dubbed “Helping Teachers Teach Mathematics Conference HTTMC ” is a collaboration between the Centre for Education Mathematics and Computing (CEMC) at the University of Waterloo, Canada, and AIMS Ghana.
The goal of the conference was to provide current teachers in Africa with opportunity to expand their knowledge on how to teach mathematics based on the foundations of the core high school curricula. It also aims to expose new ways of teaching and applying modern mathematics.
This blended online and in-person conference offered the mathematics teachers the opportunity to connect and share ideas and attracted very seasoned mathematicians as resource persons, educators and consultants.
A lecturer at the University of Waterloo and also, with the Centre for Education, Mathematics and Computing, Comfort Mintah, believes the teachers will acquire different teaching techniques to improve their teaching abilities.
“We don’t go to the classrooms and see our ourselves teach more in theoretical ways and so this conference is to help us understand how to teach in a more applied way of teaching most of the concepts of mathematics. We will not go to the classroom and tell teachers to solve linear systems of equations or quadratic equations but try to set up a question such that the students are able to critically think and apply the concept of linear systems of equations to the question”.
With many Ghanaian students having phobia for mathematics, Ms. Mintah observed “It boils down to the way our teachers teach them which is very important. If you teach them in a way that is fearful and like previously we go for ‘mental maths’ and we beat you if you don’t do well, it put fear in children but then if you make it more fun and introduce more visualization of the problem it makes it easier for people to enjoy the course”. She stressed.
Making a presentation on the topic – “Understanding Mathematics: Returning to the why”? A professor at the University of Waterloo, Rich Dlin further observed, there is a revolution of the approach to mathematics and move away from the rigid approach to the subject.
“Mathematics is really about problem-solving for the future and a lot of my friends will say we don’t know what problems we will encounter in the future but we know we will encounter problems. And so in the classrooms we are trying to move away from our approach to mathematics that’s more fluid and allows more creativity in problem-solving and leverage the power of thinking behind mathematics”.
Other speakers also touched on several topics including “Exploring ideas to help students talk about mathematics in class; destroying the phobia for mathematics through innovative communication of the subject and shaping up using the concrete diagrammatic symbolic continuum in geometry”