Last month, the Samuel Powel Elementary School Library was transformed for a very special engagement: a math festival celebrating the culmination of Penn GSE’s pilot elective, Math Tutoring in an Elementary School.
Over the course of a few hours, three classrooms of first graders visited stations run by the undergraduate and Penn GSE graduate students enrolled in the inaugural course. Tables were set up for kids to color maps, count steps, and play, among other games, “Apple Picking,” “Tile with a Smile,” and “Domino Dissection.” All incorporate strategic thinking, basic number sense, and math fluency within engaging games or puzzles.
The instant reviews of the math festival were raves. One student unknowingly summed up the central goal of the day when they exclaimed, “How is that math? It’s too fun!”
The Math Tutoring in an Elementary School course was co-taught by instructors Joy Anderson Davis, who serves as a senior instructional coach for the Penn Literacy Network at Penn GSE, and Caroline B. Ebby, an adjunct professor at Penn GSE who is also a senior researcher at CPRE and the director of the Responsive Math Teaching Project (RMT).
The academically based community service (ABCS) elective is supported by the Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnerships and is open to Penn undergraduate and graduate students. Its purpose is to redefine traditional tutoring by designing its curriculum and approach.
“Tutors are rarely taught or trained. It’s a different type of learning and requires its own curriculum,” explains Ebby, who along with Davis had been considering and organizing the elective course for years. “Being a successful college or graduate student isn’t enough. We need to help tutors learn how to support young students’ understanding of math so that they are truly facilitating learning, rather than just leading learners to the right answer.”
During the Spring 2024 semester, Penn’s students traveled twice weekly to West Philadelphia’s Powel Elementary School and provided one-on-one tutoring to first graders needing additional support in math literacy and fluency.
Just don’t call the Penn students “tutors.” Their Powel counterparts preferred the less formal moniker “math friends.”
Read more at Penn GSE.
