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| A Stanford education professor has designed a new program for teachers
to help them inspire young learners and engage them more deeply in math. Photo: Stanford Report |
Math, too often, gets a bad rap. Many people say it's hard and confusing, that you either get it or you don't, and it's so–not-fun.
But it doesn't have to be this way, argues Stanford Graduate School of Education Professor Jo Boaler, who has designed a new program for teachers to help them inspire young learners and engage them more deeply in math.
The program, called the "Week of Inspirational Math," provides teachers with five lessons (one for each school day) to incorporate in their classrooms. The lessons include fun and engaging math problems as well as videos with positive messages about math.
Boaler announced the initiative in her keynote address in Boston to the annual meeting of the National Council of Supervisors of Math, an organization of math leaders including teachers, school administrators, math specialists and others.
"We want to give kids inspirational math tasks that help them see math as a lovely subject of beautiful patterns and deep inquiry," Boaler said. "And we want teachers to see what happens when kids are really engaged in math."
The lessons address five key areas of math: geometry, algebra, numbers, patterns and connections. The problems are so-called "low floor, high ceiling" tasks that are accessible to all students but can be solved in different ways to challenge those just being introduced to the topics as well as high achievers. They also emphasize different messages: Mistakes help you grow, for example, and it's not how fast you complete a task that's important but how deeply you understand it.
Go to youcubed.org to find math tasks, online courses, research papers, discussions and more.
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Source: Stanford Report
