Teaching math through inquiry can be excellent. It’s a goal to aspire to. But for many struggling students, jumping straight into pure inquiry without any explicit instruction first can be paralyzing. Juliana Tapper’s Math Wars model helps teachers find the happy (gray) medium.
When we over-guide our math students, we don’t build understanding, we replace it, writes veteran teacher, author and math coach Pamela Seda. “We want students who, after leaving our class, can find their way – not students who are dependent on a voice telling them where to turn.”
After her close study of insights from three leading math educators, Kathleen Palmieri took “a deep dive into what I had been doing in my classroom and flipped the stage to create a Thinking Classroom for my students.” See examples of how she’s moved from theories to practice.
In our math classrooms, writes Mona Iehl, we’ve often trained students to look for what to do instead of making sense of what the problem is actually saying. When they see fractions, they search for a rule. But what if the goal is not to decode but to understand the situation?
What if we approached math as an experimental subject and encouraged students to work together to solve problems using a “lab mindset”? Fifth grade teacher and NBCT Kathie Palmieri has been exploring science and math standards with the power of collaborative learning in mind.
When math interventionist Juliana Tapper was forced to teach grade-level content, her MS kids “moved from apathy to hope,” and she had a revelation. When we provide access, structural support, and the right fluency practice, we stop being gatekeepers and become gatebreakers.
Kids don’t learn math by listening to us solve problems. They learn math by talking about how THEY solve problems. Author and math educator Mona Iehl shares how to implement three shifts: providing more student talk time, anticipating student approaches, and creating predictable routines.
Helping math students doesn’t mean showing them the next step – it means giving them the confidence and space to find it. If our goal is to create independent problem solvers, we cannot always be the ones doing the solving, writes teaching coach Mona Iehl, author of Word Problem Workshop.
Getting students to show their reasoning isn’t about adding one more step, writes math coach Mona Iehl. It’s about redefining how math learning happens and coming to see that students learn not through memorizing steps, but through reasoning, discussion, and exploration.
When we teach mathematics the way we were taught in school, are our students really doing math? Coach Mona Iehl shares the strategies she uses to engage kids in learning, going beyond superficial procedures and worksheets to explore, discuss, and even have fun in math class.
