Recently I was asked why it is important for students to experience productive struggle during a math lesson. This is a very fair question, since historically the role of math teacher has been to explain math concepts so clearly that students can’t help but understand. Why would we ever want to intentionally cause students to […]
Finding the area of polygons is pretty easy if the shapes are familiar to you like rectangles, triangles, circles, etc. Those shapes have nice formulas we can learn that will give us the area of the figure without much hassle. But what about unusual shapes like this? Sure we could find the area of this […]
Children should be led to make their own investigations and to draw their own inferences. They should be told as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible. -David Eugene Smith (1904) I will never forget the day I finally became a mathematician. Was it when I was placed in the […]
Fifteen years ago I thought I knew how to teach mathematics. At that point, I had been teaching mathematics at the secondary level for about thirteen years. I was a proud, card-carrying member of local and national mathematics organizations such as California Math Council (CMC), Bay Area Math Project (BAMP), and the National Council of […]
A study has looked at a new way of teaching mathematics in primary and secondary school classrooms, and its ability to enhance learning. from Pocket via Did you enjoy this article? Then read the full version from the author’s website.