As a teacher for 11 years and a middle school math adviser, I have seen a wide range of different math programs and classes. I will share here the 10 best educational tips that I have collected over the years.
1. Provide attractive content to explore.
A few years ago, the college I worked with said: “Maybe the class can be fun, but I can't make it cool. This assumption is worth exploring.
Take the high school math project at Ron Berger School to study radon levels in their own homes. The study of radon is boring. But Berger’s cool project should be one of the most compelling projects in the history of the math class. What if his students discovered dangerous levels of radon in the homes of a single geographic area and published the results as they suggested? What will happen to real estate values in this area? What he found was that students were very active in mapping, learning lessons, learning standard deviations — students who still didn’t care about radon or other concepts.
So what's the trick? The trick is that there is none. You cannot fool students into finding something convincing if it is not. Spend some time developing several topics to study during the year, which you will find in the qualifications: economics, presidential campaigns, the human body, etc. Find an authentic way to present your result - paper, Internet, magazine. Keep your project small, authentic and skillful.
Students of teachers who are engaged in such time, have better results in state tests than students of teachers who adhere to the text only. Virtually any social research context provides a foundation for learning that adds depth.
Even teachers who conduct a mathematical “thematic” class only once a month see real advantages, so you don’t need to give up your regular class. And you will find that students are more busy when they are in a regular class.
If you want to go very deeply and have solid support from the administrator, take a look at the school reformist movement of the Expeditionary Educational Institutions, which are excellent for thematic training.
2. Do not use extraneous rewards, such as candy, shopping items, stickers, etc.
There is nothing more specific than seeing a culture of declining math class for several years when a teacher bribes them. The intention of the teacher, of course, is good. The teacher takes care of his students and wants the best for them. “I don't care how they study math,” one teacher told me. "I just want them to learn this, to be prepared." The teacher cared enough to buy chocolates from his own pocket, but the real message for students is: “positive reinforcement” of chocolates means that “mathematics should not be done by itself”. The study also speaks clearly about this, and shows us that external, impracticable rewards impair learning.
Even if the effects are not immediate, over time, so-called “positive reinforcements,” such as those mentioned above, destroy another qualitative mathematical program. As a teacher, you are much better off trying to create a curriculum that meets the requirements than to buy candy.
3. Build a culture where students teach each other.
For many teachers, one student helping another is called deception. But I actually found that the best high school math programs encourage students to join at a specific time throughout the week. Activities usually ended as complete or incomplete, and when it was tied to meaningful tasks, such as collecting data and collecting baseline data, the students' understanding was greater than for individual tasks.
Building a culture that works for student couples or groups takes many years and a lot of practice. But before you give up and decide that it does not work, determine whether you will first follow tips # 1 and # 2.
4. Give less, but more meaningful work, including homework.
Trends in international mathematics and science study the curriculum in the United States as a mile wide and an inch deep. Their review of mathematical texts in high school showed that some of them are almost 700 pages. With a lot of pressure to teach standards as a teacher, you may be tempted to skip to many topics in the text. Not. It is learning a little.
Select the most important parts before the beginning of the year and save them simply. Teach your understanding of the concept of depth.
The national advisory council, formed from the study, recommended “first put things first” and suggested that it is actually less. Take the time to drop the curriculum to an acceptable size for your students and present them only to these. If you need to “cover” the standards, find out what the standards and documents are when you really teach them in class. You will find that teaching with depth often comes to a wide range of standards.
Good to know that driving. As the National College of Research agrees, publishers are trying to meet the needs of hundreds of different areas by including everything any school can wish for. And although publishers are making selective publications, it is just as difficult to create a mathematical program for a small area as a large one. Thus, the problems of book publishing lead to a uniform, uniformly created comprehensive textbook. Often this is a very large text or a whole series.
In class, teachers and students have become overwhelmed and unable to cope with the volume or breadth of instruction in this form. As teachers, we must recognize that the predominantly negative emotions surrounding mathematics in high school, and that all that we can reduce these emotions will be of great importance for academic achievement. Placing a 500-page text in front of a 7th grade student illegally helps, so use it for free and create small home-made laptops for daily use.
5. Modeling thinking, not decisions or answers.
Do not show the student how to solve something. “Think out loud” instead. For example, you may have a board with a problem up, and start by saying: “Well, I notice that 4 numbers that I have to summarize are in thousands of categories, the first is about 3000, the second is about 5000, and the third. .. I'm confused ... ”The model accurately reflects what you think, including confusion, emotions, skills, strategies, and more.
When you do this, let your students know what mathematics thinks. One piece of research that is useful to know is that mathematicians think long about how to create a problem, take a little time to solve this problem, and “look around” for a long time asking the question: “Does this make sense? A model that is for your students, having set themselves a difficult problem and having spent time, and not just pounce on a solution, but just talk about what strategies you can use to solve the problem.
6. Provide immediate feedback related to the task, not comparative and pave the way for the next steps.
Many teachers believe that classification is a form of feedback. Is not. Sorting when everything is good can be a form of learning assessment, but the difference should be clear. Grades are not an effective evaluation tool for learning. Grades are the end of the road when you assess what has been learned, but they should not be intended to inform the student where to go next.
Take, for example, three groups of students who received different “feedbacks” on mathematical papers that “entered.” The first group received only narrative feedback (no evaluation), telling them where and how they made mistakes. The second group received a rating (or rating) and descriptive feedback. The third group received only an assessment. Unsurprisingly, students who received narrative feedback improved upon retesting. Those who received only an assessment did not have information for improvement and did the same with repeated testing. But here is the amazing part. There was no difference between a “class only” group and a group that received a rating and descriptive feedback. What for? Students who received both a grade and narrative feedback completely ignored written suggestions and only looked at the grade. "I have a blah blah blah blah ... what did you get?"
Since we live in a world where grades and formalized grades are so important, work with the system, differentiating the grade of training and the grade of training.
When you evaluate, one guide should refer to Rick Stiggins's assessment strategies for training. Thus, when you conduct a learning assessment (for example, assess), you will notice that for a moment you are going out of the role of improving student learning and will not face two things at once in a conflict.
7. Change the mimeograph sheets to the problems that you and your students have personally developed.
The pervasive aspect of our culture is to provide page after page of information. Hundreds of pages of documents are distributed at faculty meetings, business meetings and conferences. It makes us look organized and prepared. It is also a way to “embrace” content. But for a high school math student, this also makes it difficult to determine what is important. Was it a faction? Was it a decimal section? Was it a number? Is this a triangle puzzle problem? Was it a cartoon?
Instead of another page on mimeography, ask your student to write their own problems with the story. Tell them to add a cover to understand. Give them breadth to make them fun. Celebrate them by placing them in the classroom. Give them 5 home problems with the stories they create for homework instead of a mimeographic sheet with 30 problems, and really immerse in improving them by revising them.
8. Use history to teach math.
Write a story, a real story with characters and plot, and add a math problem. Write about wizards who must use corners for their witchcraft. Write about spices trading ships in deep seas. Write a story that lasts a whole page before you get into the math part. You have used the right side or less of the analytical part of the brain, and you will see the powerful effect of extended interaction.
9. Receive math volunteers once a week for two months before government testing.
As a teacher or administrator, spend time during the autumn months planning and planning one day every week during February and March (right before testing) so that volunteers come to study mathematics in small groups. But it's good that if they are properly designed, these volunteers do not need to undergo special training in mathematics.
Start with a simple plan. Each student has 10 skills that they have chosen to work during the session of the entire class, and recorded their practical problems in the classroom. Phone calls are made, specific planning is done with the administrator, and volunteers come and help students answer 10 questions during class time with support. Training schedule once a week for two months before testing and see their grades improve significantly.
10. Work with the emotions that your students have for math.
10a. Ask your students how they relate to mathematics. Periodically use a little time to better understand where they are. And just let them feel how they feel. If they like math, they like it. If they are bored, empathize. If your students do not stand up for math, you will get a lot more opportunities by seeing their perspectives than by trying to prove that they are wrong. As a teacher, this is difficult, because we are so used to trying to “fix” the situation, and, of course, our ego is tied to student emotions. If our students are bored, we feel that we are not doing the right thing. But the fuller truth is that we all have ebbs and flows on the topics that we study. When boredom, frustration and negativity arise, try to understand it. Sometimes the class feels a bit boring. This is normal. And then slowly, over a number of years, create these compelling things in your classes so that you trample down boring times with excitement and joy.
10b. Go slowly. Changing the direction of your math class is like trying to change the direction of a large ship, especially when dealing with emotions. Even when everything happens, you will notice that the momentum of the “ship” will go in the same old direction until you feel any real changes. This is part of the process. It took me three years to develop a coherent math program in my high school, and even then we usually approached old models. Good luck!
