Reply To: Lesson 3-1: Question

[Brian Hudson]

One of the most helpful books for myself in preparing to become a teacher was reading Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All and one of the main teaching practices they focus on is supporting productive struggle in learning mathematics. But I mostly put this principle into action when thinking about productive struggle when students aren’t understanding a concept during a lesson. Now I would need to focus on ensuring that students can still have that productive struggle in my class but with lessons that they aren’t used to seeing. I know that a lot of my higher level Algebra 1 students definitely don’t have that mathematical perseverance, as unfortunately most of those students are so used to just memorizing formulas and procedures and sadly when I try to promote higher level thinking in my classroom to them, their brains tune out because they don’t know how to think about the problem.