An Evaluation of Good Practice when Teaching Early Mathematical Concepts Summary

An Evaluation of Good Practice
when Teaching Early Mathematical Concepts (EYFS AND Year 1)
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An Evaluation of Good Practice when Teaching Early Mathematical Concepts
(EYFS AND Year 1)
Introduction
Effective learning is highly desirable in teaching. Good teaching practices are fundamental precursors of effective learning, where learners achieve teaching goals and objectives. Teaching at all levels is challenging due to the demand for high grades, increasing curriculum workloads, and learner-centric issues. The teacher navigates these challenges through deploying practices that optimize the learning process and outcomes. Teaching EYFS and Year 1 requires a set of skills, strategies, methods, and practices that allow learnings to gain and apply mathematical knowledge. The teacher facilitates guidance and extends children's mathematical learning processes through meaningful interactions underpinning best practices. The curriculum, interactions, and enabling environment are core areas of focus in EYFS practice, while equally noting that pedagogy in EFYS is different from Primary. Best practices should deploy different pedagogy and develop a specific curriculum, learning structure, and environment, and emphasizing the role of a teacher at the level of EFYS and year I.
Meaning of Good Teaching Practice
Good teaching practices comprises proven, tested, and widely agreed strategies that are considered highly effective and efficient. Good practices make up a model whose results are proven or evidenced-based. A best practice embodies accepted teaching strategies that are superior to any alternatives because of their optimized learning outcomes or is considered a standard approach to teaching.
Identification, Description, and Evaluation of Learning Theories and Good Practice associated with Teaching of early Mathematics.
It is challenging to teach mathematics effectively. Most teachers encounter various problems while engaging in the mathematic learning process and activities, especially amongst EFYS and year I classes. Contemporary teachers should overcome such challenges and adopt different strategies that guide children during mathematics lessons. Most approaches to addressing challenges in mathematics and facilitating effective learning among early childhood learners, such as EFYS and year I, are anchored on different theoretical frameworks. Teaching theoretical frameworks to teach mathematics early encapsulates various theories such as behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism, and the recent theory of connectivism (Kashefi et al., 2017 pp. 607-612).
The theory of behaviorism is one of the centric approaches to teaching mathematics across all groups of learnings and levels of learning, including early childhood. According to behaviorism learning theory, learners are often influenced by external environments. Alteration of learners' environment results in his or her shift in thoughts, behavior, and feelings. The purpose of instruction for the behaviorist is to cause the desired response from the learner presented with a target stimulus (Ertmer and Newby, 2013, pp 47).
Behaviorism-related learning is anchored on positive rein...