Maths - A different approach

After doing another blog on maths I was given a book written by Jo Boaler which I had mention in my blog. I found the book easy to read and was able to relate to some of the situations and thoughts that was mentioned. Something that got me from the start of the book is what they said about powerful thinkers are those who make connections, think logically and use space, data and numbers creatively. Which is definitely what we want children to be able to do, but the thing is how do you do it? How do you use numbers creatively, this intrigued me as the making connections makes sense as we try where possible to make maths relate to situations that might come up in their life.

The book talks about how the problems that the children look at in groups with different leveled children allows the opportunity for the problem to be approached in different ways. By sharing the different methods it can show that problems can be worked out in different ways. The tasks that the children complete are open tasks allowing different approaches and strategies to be used. From this task the children  have to convince others of the answer and how they got their answer. It talked about how visually showing these strategies can be helpful too.

The idea of the different ability groups got me on to this book in the first place as I had a few questions on how that would work successfully. This book helped me to understand a little as to how you set up the environment and the tasks. According to this book they found that the low achieving students rise to the level of the highest achieving students. They feel that both the high and low achievers gain from this type of grouping. I still have my concerns a bit on this but would love to give it a go.

I do like aspects of this approach such as how the children are encouraged to pose questions reason and justify and be sceptical about the task.

If we give students a rich creative, growth mindset experience then we change them as people and the ways they interact with the world.

These key points come up
1. Everyone can learn maths to the highest levels.
2. Mistakes are valuable
3. Questions are really important
4. Math is about creativity and making sense
5. Math is about connections and communicating
6. Value depth over spread
7. Math class is about learning not performing.

These ideas help wrap up the main ideas of the book.  This book certainly gave me some good ideas and some inspiration to keep looking at  new ideas to teach in maths.