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Key points:
One of the challenges to getting students engaged in math is the perception that it’s a subject where you sit at a desk and do 30 math problems alone.
There are a number of ways to make math more collaborative and fun, including shifting the emphasis from procedures to discourse, embracing game-based learning, and using data to continually adapt tools to students’ needs.
Here’s how to bring those ideas to life in the classroom.
From procedure to problem-solving
One way to facilitate more engaging math instruction is to shift from teaching procedure to encouraging active problem-solving. One way to know you’ve got a great problem-solving task is that it creates rich discussion. An example of this is ST Math Puzzle Talks, which include five puzzles with teacher notes to help guide the conversation. They offer possible strategies that students might use that the teacher should be aware of, as well as questions such as “What do you notice?” or “What do you wonder?” to spur deeper discussion about the puzzle in front of them.
Engaging students in discourse through an inquiry-based approach is a process. Teachers can start by doing one or two math discourse tasks a week. Over a semester, as you continue to do this, you will start to see more and more students engaging and wanting to share. This inquiry-based approach is effective because it is based on how the brain functions. When students talk and explain something, it activates the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas of the brain, which connects them to a deeper level of meaning and understanding. When they hear others explain their thinking, it informs their thinking and may even change the way they approach similar problems in the future.
This discourse serves to bring out students’ strategies, which gives them a voice in the class, and also allows them to attach their own language to math. Teachers can apply the academic vocabulary later in the process, but to me an engaging math class is like a book club–to have a rich discussion at your book club, you need a fascinating book to discuss. What that means in math class is that you need a task that’s intriguing enough for students to build their discussions around. Puzzle-like tasks certainly fit that description.
Game-based and play-based learning
Game-based learning is different from gamification. It’s not a “chocolate-covered broccoli” experience–it’s an authentic experience with an authentic task that follows a well-designed learning progression. In a well-designed game, often the scenario is presented visually, enabling students to apply their creative problem-solving skills. In these activities, students can see all the information they need (which removes the language barrier), and they get immediate visual feedback based on their actions. Games can boost engagement by showing students not only the puzzle or challenge at hand, but also a map of where they’ve been and where they’re going within the world of the game. Through a mastery-driven progression, students continue to progress from one learning experience to the next. Implemented effectively, this can lead to the development of an asset-based lens around mathematics as opposed to a deficit-lens by constantly reinforcing the gap between where students currently are and where they should be.
This sort of well-designed game-based learning leads naturally to play-based learning, where students work together to solve problems. As they collaboratively solve one puzzle, they gather data on how they might approach solving the next one–and teachers gather rich data as well.
Data-driven education
Data-driven education boosts engagement by using large data sets to analyze the effectiveness of learning content. This data can be used to make program modifications that make the educational experience even more effective and engaging year after year.
Math games are particularly well-suited to data-driven education. Evaluating the impact of games across various demographics empowers teachers to minimize students’ unproductive struggle and maximize their engagement by focusing on the games with the highest “learning density.”
To further support teachers in making math as engaging as possible, we’re exploring through a grant with the Gates Foundation adding an engagement metric to ST Math’s student and teacher dashboards. Our goal is for teachers to use this data to offer feedback to students as they are playing the games, creating real-time math discourse that’s both collaborative and fun.
