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Recap of Week 3

Based on the experiences of both course leaders and students, we provide a summary of week 3.
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Hello and welcome to the fourth and last week of this MOOC, of this course. I was very happy to see you again in the last week when we were talking about practice makes perfect and also a variation theory and it was nice to see that many people again recognised a lot from their own classroom practices. There was a lot of agreement that both procedural fluency, procedural knowledge skills and understanding and a lot of practice all go hand in hand in mathematics education. Many of you recognised this and agreed with it.
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Sometimes with a slight preference for one or the other and that’s fine but just as long as we can agree that all of it is important, then at least we can do away with those so-called Math Wars that have lasted far too long. Variation theory was also considered very useful, although some of you noted that it could become quite complicated.
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And they are right: we should make sure that these sequences of tasks, should not be too complicated. They really should be well-balanced and that’s why I sometimes love to use textbooks because there you have designers who have thought about sequences of tasks and then you can utilise them in the classroom. There also were a couple of comments about the ‘animal problem’ from last week’s video and I’ll put a link in this step with a little bit more explanation. This week we’re going to look at the last section, which is go a little bit further with regard to how practice makes perfect and the Two Basics that we covered previously, and then we’ll go into a very important
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question: How do these Asian countries actually do their professional development? So it’s great that we have principles, but how do you make sure that the teachers in a school actually manage to use it. That’s what we’re going to talk about this week and I hope to see you in the comments again.

Welcome to Week 4!

In Week 3 we focused on the Two Basics and Variation theory as Asian mathematics teaching methods. Based on the experiences of Educators and learners, in this video, we provide a summary of Week 3, and respond to some of the comments and questions made during the week.

I have added one more visual explanation of the ‘animal problem’ at the bottom of this step.

In Week 4 we will look at one final principle and then explore how Asian countries manage to integrate these principles into their classroom activities. The key term here is ‘professional development’. We will give some examples from a variety of countries.

We hope you enjoy this final week!

This video was uploaded on Friday, the 21th of September, 2018 and is based on the comments made in the second run of the MOOC.

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This content is taken from Macmillan Education online course
World Class Maths: Asian Teaching Methods
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