Episode 61 -The Benefits of Inventing Algorithms

Welcome fellow Recovering Traditionalists to Episode 61.  Today we are looking at The Benefits of Inventing Algorithms.  This past weekend I did a webinar each day that thousands of elementary educators attended.  It was the same webinar just different days/times to allow for people’s scheduling.  If you didn’t get a chance to attend you can still catch the limited-time replay for the next few days at buildmathminds.com/replay.  The webinar was all about how to help kids develop their own ways of solving problems and not be reliant upon algorithms or strategies taught by the teacher.  My first glimpse into teaching math in this way was through the research of Thomas Carpenter, Elizabeth Fennema, and Megan Frank-e (1996).  Then their book, Children’s Mathematics: Cognitively Guided Instruction came out and gave me even more insight into opening up my teaching through the use of story problems to allow children’s thinking to help guide my instruction. In today’s podcast I’m reading from that book about the benefits of inventing algorithms. Get all the resources mentioned in this episode at buildmathminds.com/61

Om Podcasten

The Build Math Minds podcast is for my fellow Recovering Traditionalists out there. If you don’t know whether or not you are a Recovering Traditionalist, here’s how I define us. We are math educators who used to teach math the traditional way. Flip lesson by lesson in the textbook, directly teaching step-by-step how to solve math problems. But now, we are working to change that to a style of teaching math that is fun and meets our students where they are at, not just teaching what comes next in the textbook. We want to encourage our students to be thinkers, problem solvers, and lovers of mathematics..we are wanting to build our students math minds and not just create calculators. If that is you, then this podcast is for you.