GUEST POST: Four Ways to Reinvent Maths Teaching and Learning

1. Expect Success

Students can all achieve success in maths, given the right sort of support. Let your students know you believe in them, that you know they can improve in maths skills, and that you are there for them if they get stuck.

2. Make Number Fact Memorisation a Priority

There can be little doubt: knowing your number facts off by heart is essential for making progress in maths later on. Students who have to rely on their fingers or a calculator to find the answer to a question like "4 x 6" will be hampered from success in maths in the future, maybe for the rest of their lives.

Use a strategy-based approach to help students to understand the numbers involved and how they relate to each other, then give short, regular practice sessions to speed up response times. Teachers using our materials report over and over that this really gets results.

3. More Showing, Less Telling

In storywriting, experts tell us that if you have to tell the reader something, that will be much less compelling than if you show it. In maths, the same could be said of learning a new mathematical process, such as simplifying a fraction. For generations, teachers have told students how to follow a process, rather than showing students what is happening and giving students the space to figure out the meaning themselves.

4. Allow Time for Thinking

There is a lot of pressure on teachers to "cover" the curriculum, and to get through the textbook. Often, students fall behind where they should be in maths. But simply talking faster or giving more homework to get kids to catch up is unlikely to help solve the core problem: they just do not understand the concepts.

Why not have certain lessons where the intention is not to finish 20 practice problems before morning tea, but to have an extended investigation of a maths process using physical materials, visual models on the data projector, butcher's paper and pens; and help students to figure out how it all makes sense? 

Maybe the kids will only complete 2 or 3 examples. But if they understand what they are doing, the learning is much more likely to "stick". 

This post has been provided by Dr Peter Price Classroom Professor. At QUEDREX 2013, Peter will present workshops on teaching number facts and fractions on the 24 & 25 August 2013 at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre.

For more details about the Queensland Education Resources Expo and to register for free tickets, please go to www.quedrex.com.au and click through the information tabs.