Teaching is often an activity that requires guile and creativity. As such, teachers have to develop ingenious ways of making students learn more using the least effort. It’s what every instructor, especially, requires when it comes to math, and how students can develop a better relationship with it through their teaching methods.
So what activity can instructors adopt to improve their content delivery, motivate, and inspire students to develop a love for math?
An Engagement Activity to Enhance the Math and Student Relationship
Every learner can appreciate, if not, adore math. However, teachers have to employ an engaging teaching method to ensure that the relationship develops, and students get to perform better as they move from one grade to another. So what activity can spur creative thinking, necessitate learning, while requiring persistence for a whole class?
One excellent way entails spending ten to fifteen minutes on a specific math challenge for fifth or sixth-grade class. It should involve the participation of everyone within the class, implying a low threshold in terms of complexity. Further, the math challenge has to have diverse ways of getting solved.
For instance, a challenge for the students to use a range of numbers from one to four to get five as an answer, can witness different methods. One can use (3+4-2) or 12-4-3, etc. When a student combines numbers, such as one and two, to form twelve in their operation, it can cause an uproar, though perfectly correct. So how can such a method or math activity fulfill the conditions of cognitive flexibility and creative thinking, perseverance and practice, and finally, motivation?
- Cognitive flexibility and creative thinking. Students can approach a challenge freely as long as it’s a method that tickles their fancy. It, therefore, implies the absence of a set procedure to stick to when it comes to a problem-solving method. Further, you can easily switch an approach to solving a problem as long as the procedural rules get adhered to.
- Perseverance and practice. To have diverse approaches to achieving the same results can promote practice besides perseverance on the part of students. It becomes possible as students have to get to the bottom of a challenge as opposed to letting the quickest students answer questions.
- Motivation. It can prove useful to expand the space when it comes to expression and recognition for students who do not necessarily come across as standouts. Allowing students to solve problems using their approaches can garner them respect from peers. After all, students in a class don’t have the same level of ability or gift concerning subjects.
Conclusion
It can prove simplistic because it only takes fifteen minutes. But, having such an activity can prove useful in bringing out the best from your students, irrespective of their talents, level of understanding, or stature in the classroom. Further, such an approach can get effectively utilized, not only physically, but in virtual spaces as well. So, consider the mentioned approach and observe a difference when it comes to the relationship between students and math.