Making Every Maths Lesson Count

Book excerpt: In Making Every Maths Lesson Count: Six principles to support great maths teaching, experienced maths teacher and lecturer Emma McCrea takes away the guesswork as she sums up the key components of effective maths teaching. Maths classrooms are incredibly complex places. At any given time, the factors influencing the effectiveness of your teaching are boundless and this can lead to relying on intuition as to what might work best. This book aims to signpost a route through this complexity. Writing in the practical, engaging style of the award-winning Making Every Lesson Count, Emma McCrea helps teachers to move beyond trial and error by sharing evidence-informed tips and suggestions on how they can nudge the impact of their teaching in the right direction. Making Every Maths Lesson Count is underpinned by six pedagogical principles challenge, explanation, modelling, practice, feedback and questioning and presents 52 high-impact strategies designed to streamline teacher workload and ramp up the level of challenge in the maths classroom. The book draws out the key findings from the latest research on memory, learning and motivation and each chapter features numerous worked examples to demonstrate the theory in action, together with a concluding series of questions that will help maths practitioners relate the content to their own classroom practice. Furthermore, Emma's writing offers clarity around the language of maths teaching and learning, and also delves into the finer points of how to identify and address any misconceptions that students may hold. Written for new and experienced practitioners alike, this gimmick-free guide provides sensible solutions to perennial problems and inspires a rich, challenging and evidence-based approach to the teaching of maths. Suitable for maths teachers of students aged 11 to 18 years, and for primary school maths specialists.