Math Works: Teaching Math with the Brain in Mind

Teaching overseas, as in the Marshall Islands, often becomes all about learning a new culture, a new language, and a new way of life. Unfortunately, as teachers, we do not often bring that new way of thinking into the classroom.  I am an experienced Mathematics teacher, with 20+ years of experience teaching internationally, but was still finding my students were not achieving the success I desired.  It was time to look deeper.

The book, How the Brain Learns Mathematics, by David A. Sousa, gave me many answers and caused me to drastically change the way I taught Math to students in the Middle Years.

First, Math is a language that most children do not speak. And if the student doesn't have a culture whose language emphasizes math, then they are less likely to "pick up" this language in English.
Second, our memory is less likely to store meaningless information that we consider unnecessary.
Third, the order and timing of how we introduce new math concepts determines how much of it is likely to be understood and used later.

I started using the concept of Math Centers in my classroom, where groups work on a variety of activities either independently, in groups, or teacher led. The tasks are designed to give students an ideal amount of time to tackle the practice of skills, review of material presented earlier in the year, investigate a new concept or pattern, and problem solve.  It was necessary that students cover all of these areas but there simply was not enough time for the whole class to visit each task every day. By rotating through the centers, the students would have enough time to work on one task a day.  The added bonus, was the group work element, which provided me more time working with a small group, and helped build team building and collaborative skills.
This process is most effective if the teachers in a department work collaboratively on a curriculum that is vertically aligned, using similar language throughout.
Naturally, the Math work must be meaningful, and seen as useful to each student.  Here is an example of how this can be done easily and effectively.

Hundredth Day of School Problem:
We want to do an activity for the 100th day of school where we will give each student 100 Froot Loops to string as a necklace. I need to go to the store and buy the correct number of boxes of cereal so that I have enough Froot Loops. How can we make sure we have enough? Come up with a plan which we can test.