I am a huge believer in friendly competition. I was teaching a summer class and my students weren't interested in the math material at all, so I decided to make the class more like a game. There were boards stationed throughout the room with different problems on them. Groups rotated to each board and did each problem and the group with the fastest cumulative time won ice cream. We did this process twice more that summer and I found huge success.Â
Students like to have stakes and control over their learning. They want it to matter. They are always wondering how they will use what they learn in school in the real world. I may not be teaching them how to do their taxes, but I can teach them how to work in teams and how to handle stress in high octane environments.
In my work at Mathnasium, I have come to realize that what students need more than anything else is someone to ask them questions. We need to work with students on topics repeatedly until a student demonstrates they have mastered it. I have seen the effects using Socratic questions has on students. They begin to put the pieces together to solve a problem and, in many cases, figure out how they got problems wrong even before I point out their error to them. Algorithms are wonderful and they make teaching students advanced topics quickly, and in large groups, a possibility. But students also need to understand the logic of where their answers are coming from.