A Baker’s Dozen of Best Practices in Teaching Mathematics
Published on Nov 18, 2015
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A Baker’s Dozen of Best Practices in Teaching Mathematics
Danielle Weber EDU 622 - Article Review #2
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What is the article about?
1. The article is directed at pre-service teachers, giving them a collection of big pedagogical ideas reflecting best practices in mathematics that they can easily apply to their classrooms.
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2. The first four big ideas include proactively, not reactively, planning lessons; filling a lesson with only meaningful activities; varying and differentiating teaching strategies; and not feeling obligated to start at page 1 of the textbook and systematically working through it.
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3. The next four big ideas are getting students actually DOING the math (they’re not spectators); facilitating learning without complete hand holding the whole way; making students aware of the learning objectives; and marketing your lessons so students want to keep coming back for more.
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4. The final best practices are planning lessons around a few big concepts instead of trivial lists or isolated information; making mathematics relevant to the student’s life and not just knowledge for a test or college; and using formative assessments to allow students practice and the opportunity to make mistakes before they are graded on their final summative assessment of the skill.
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5. Overall, the goal of the article is to have pre-service teachers understand that teaching mathematics should be real and meaningful for their students and to give them a good base of best practices to start teaching with.
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What did I ‘get’ from the article?
1. These are not only best practices for math; they can be used over many subject areas.
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2. Like we read and discussed in Week 2 of EDU 622, this article also makes a big deal out of students understanding what the point of their lesson is and where it is going (i.e. objectives), though the article states that it doesn’t have to always be shared at the beginning of the lesson.
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3. In the section, “A Lesson Filled with Activities is not Necessarily a Good One”, I appreciated the authors hammering home that ‘busy work’ does not equal effective productive work, so instead, activities should all tie into the big lesson objectives.
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4. Another area beginner teachers (including myself) can struggle with is the pressure to start at page one of a textbook and rush through the year to cover every chapter in the book, when it would actually be more effective to use DDI and assess where students are in the learning sequence before teaching them anything.
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5. A point in the assessment section of the article that grabbed my attention was how strongly the authors rejected awarding or subtracting grade points for student behavior or effort because it did not have any baring on the reason for the assessment, testing what the student understands and can do.
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