Tips for Effective Teaching of Mathematics

Zeal study shares you the tips and tricks for the teacher to be effective and satisfied in his work. This article is about how a Mathematics teachers can make his teaching and learning Effective in all aspects.

Helping Students Learn Concepts and Procedures

In our schools, much is made of the use of manipulatives to help children understand abstract concepts in mathematics, but many manipulatives and models themselves are abstract (students treat them as a symbol for something else), and not all manipulatives help learning—they sometimes impede it. This is most likely when manipulatives are so visually interesting that they distract from their purpose, when their relationship to the concept to be represented is obscure, or when they are used for rote counting. Manipulatives seem helpful because they are concrete; to be helpful, they should satisfy certain properties.

To illustrate the idea of a fraction, one might divide a cookie in two for the purpose of sharing it with a student. The concreteness of this example is likely less important than its familiarity. In contrast, suppose I cut a hexagon into two pieces and said, “See? Now there are two equal pieces. Each one is half a hexagon.” That example is concrete but less effective because it is unfamiliar; the student has no experience with divided hexagons, and the purpose of sharing is also missing.

Concreteness, in itself, is not a magical property that allows teachers to pour content into students’ minds. It is the familiarity that helps because it allows the teacher to prompt students to think in new ways about things they already know. However, familiarity also may create some misconceptions, half a pizza, half a cookie, half a glass are not precise as key characteristics of fractions may be missed. Students know a fraction when they focus on: (a) What is my whole here? (b) How many parts are there in this whole? (c) Are the parts equal? (d) Do all the parts together make the whole? (e) What is the name of each part? (f) How many of these parts will make the whole? And (g) What is the new name of the whole in the light of these parts? The teacher’s language, questions, and sequence of activities with materials transform the concrete models into representations—pictorial and abstract.

A teacher must move from familiar materials and models to the form that shows all the attributes of the concept and then can lead to abstract representations that are congruent to the abstract procedure. As concepts become more complex, it becomes harder to generate familiar examples from students’ lives to generate mathematics conceptual schemas, and teachers may have to use analogies more often. In such cases, a familiar situation is offered as analogous to the concept under discussion, not as an example of the concept.

To achieve the different kinds of knowledge, we need to adopt pedagogical principles in every lesson that are informed by the Standards of Mathematics Practice:

Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.

Reason abstractly and quantitatively.

Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.

Model with mathematics.

Use appropriate tools strategically.

Attend to precision.

Look for and make use of structure.

Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

Each of these standards adds to a teacher’s ability to develop the different components of knowledge, helping children acquire mathematical ways of thinking, creating interest for mathematics, and recognizing the power of mathematics. We need to incorporate these practices in our lessons if we want to have students who enjoy doing mathematics and achieve higher.

There should be a clear understanding of what and how to represent each concept, procedure and the skill involved in this standard. Every concept and procedure involved in this standard should be transformed into a set of concepts and skills to be learned, mastered, and applied by the students. In the context of CCSS-M, teaching should be to acquire understanding; students should arrive at fluency and should be able to apply concepts and skills contextually.

Step # 1

Language and Concepts

Know the meaning of each word and term in order to translate from English to mathematical equations

Identify the unknowns and understand the role of these unknowns; know the relationship(s) between knowns and unknowns

Step # 2

Language and Concepts

Represent terms and words into appropriate mathematics symbols; translate multi-step word problems into/by equation(s)

Skills and Facts

Identify the units and the domain and the range of the variable(s) involved in the problem

Step # 3

Procedures

Solve multistep word problems by establishing the sequence of arithmetic operations

Skills and Facts

Know and apply the properties of equality; mastery of arithmetic facts; execute procedures for whole numbers efficiently; know the order of operations

Step # 4

Concepts and Procedure

Assess the reasonableness of the answer

Skills and Facts

Numbersense: Use mental computations such as rounding to estimate the outcome of an operation

Step # 5

Language and Concepts

Interpret the answer including the remainder if involved; express the division problems in multiple ways

Skills and Facts

Add, subtract, multiply and divide whole numbers fluently with understanding; know the role of numbers in each operation, e.g., know the role of remainder in practical situations

Learning with rigor using SMP means that the students not only understand the concept and procedures but also see that a particular method(s) may have limitations and that the context of the problem defines the applicability and efficiency of the method.