TLL MiniMa - children and adults explore mathematics

Mathematical skills acquired before starting school form the basis for successful learning at school, academic achievement, and social participation. Early mathematics education processes require competent support from educational staff.

MiniMa therefore focuses on

• training educational staff at elementary level, teachers at primary level, and students in the field of early mathematics education (Childhood Education and Teacher Education for Primary Schools),
• developing a Teaching and Learning Lab for early mathematics education and providing the necessary scientific and academic support,
• developing mathematical play and learning environments for early childhood education,
• investigating the numerous aspects of early mathematics education, such as mathematical thinking and learning processes, mathematical interactions in teaching and learning contexts, and opportunities to professionalise in mathematics education.

The MiniMa project was initiated and developed starting from 2010 by Professor Christiane Benz and Dr Johanna Zöllner.

Once or twice a year, a training phase is organised for educational staff and teachers on mathematical content areas such as “Counting and seeing” or “Comparing and measuring”. Each training phase is divided into three modules:

1. Workshop,

2. Visit to the Join-in studio with children's groups, and

3. Follow-up meeting for retrospective and evaluation.

Each module in turn focuses on a specific facet of competence (professional, action, diagnostic, and reflective competence) that educators can acquire and further develop.

Each training phase starts with a workshop that provides educators with the opportunity to acquire or deepen their specialist and didactic knowledge in the field of mathematics, thus combining theory and practice. The focus is on the basics of mathematics education (professional expertise) as well as on motivating children to discover and explore mathematics and drumming up their enthusiasm for the subject.

Educational staff and teachers as well as lecturers jointly consider which play and learning environments can be designed for a specific content area. Together with the participants, the play and learning environments are planned and designed and suggestions for expected interactions, such as actions, stimuli, and questions, are discussed. A written record of the planning and modelling process is handed over to all participants to enable them to implement the play and learning environments at their respective institutions.

The following contents have been jointly developed and tested in play and learning environments:

• Counting and seeing,
• Exploring patterns,
• Comparing and measuring,
• Building and laying,
• Organising, sorting, and communicating,
• Finding structures,
• Symmetry,
• Mathematical discoveries when mirroring,
• Dialogue-based reading aloud and reading along with the help of mathematical picture books.

After attending the workshop, educational staff and teachers have the opportunity to visit, together  with their group of children, the MiniMa Join-in studio, which is the centrepiece of the research and development project. Here, the play and learning environments that they have developed can be realised and the educators are supported in acquiring pedagogical and didactic skills.

They can observe and stimulate the children's mathematical discoveries and reflect on them together with them. They are supported by two student assistants who encourage mathematical discoveries and conversations about mathematical content and document by video recordings the children's learning processes as they discover mathematical relationships. The focus is on supporting learning processes arising while discovering and exploring mathematics (action competence).

The following guiding principles for discovering and exploring mathematics are fundamental to the work with children in the MiniMa Join-in Studio. Children discover maths...

...through play,
...in a roundabout way,
...individually and differently,
...together with other children and the educators.

The introductory quote by Dutch mathematician and mathematics educator Hans Freudenthal describes mathematics as an activity characterised by individual and collaborative problem-solving. At the MiniMa Join-in studio, children and educators are given the opportunity to approach challenging mathematical situations in a playful and exploratory way and to engage in the investigation of mathematical ideas and contexts.

At the end of the training phase, a joint follow-up meeting is organised for the educators to reflect on their experiences. Given some distance in terms of time, this kind of retrospective view is intended to enable an in-depth analysis. Video recordings are used to review and discuss the processes of exploring and discovering mathematics that evolve between the educators and their groups of children.

In the retrospective phases, participants reflect on communicative patterns between children and adults and their own professional actions (reflective competence). They also analyse and discuss children's solution processes against the background of theoretical models (diagnostic competence). Eventually, alternative modes of action are considered and worked out together. In addition, the design of the learning and exploration environment is evaluated and the possibilities for implementing it in the educators' everyday work are discussed.

The MiniMa project offers multiple starting points for other research projects, which attract the interest of numerous researchers worldwide. For example, we are engaged in international dialogue with Israel, Australia, Sweden, and Norway. Selected publications on specific thematic areas are listed below.