About the Book
Teaching Math, Science, and Technology in Schools Today: Guidelines for Engaging Both Eager and Reluctant Learners offers unique, engaging, and thought-provoking ideas. The activities open imaginative doors to learning and provide opportunities for all learners. It surveys today’s most important trends and dilemmas while explaining how collaboration and critical thinking can be translated into fresh classroom practices. Questions, engagement, and curiosity are viewed as natural partners for mathematical problem solving, scientific inquiry, and learning about technology. Like the Common Core State Standards, the book builds on the social nature of learning to provide suggestions for both eager and reluctant learners. The overall goal of the book is to deepen the collective conversation, challenge thinking, and provide some up-to-date tools for teachers so they can help reverse the steady erosion of math, science, and technology understanding in the general population.
Table of Contents:
Preface
Chapter 1: Helping All Students Learn About Math and Science
Chapter 2: Creative and Inventive Thinking: Collaborative Inquiry, Open-Ended Problem Solving, and Innovation
Chapter 3: Mathematical Problem Solving: Reasoning and Collaborating in an Age of Data
Chapter 4: Science Involving All Students with Active Involvement and Collaborative Inquiry
Chapter 5: Technology: The Powerful Possibility of Tools
About the Author :
Dennis Adams is a former Fulbright Scholar who taught elementary school and also higher education at the University of Minnesota, University of Maine, and McGill University in Montreal. He did graduate work at Harvard University and has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He is the author of more than twenty books and more than a hundred journal articles on various educational topics.
Mary Hamm has taught at Ohio State University and the University of Colorado. More recently, she has been teaching at San Francisco State University. She has worked on both the math and science standards and has published more than a dozen books and eighty journal articles on these subjects.
Review :
In this clear and concise book, Adams and Hamm demonstrate how collaborative inquiry and problem solving strategies can be used to engage both eager and reluctant learners in math, science, and technology. The book provides examples of activities that can be used in K–8 classrooms and shows how the activities can be used to differentiate instruction for learners at different ability levels. The activities covered include a variety of math content, such as numbers and operations, fractions, patterns and functions, algebra, geometry, and measurement. It also has some activities to enhance students' science inquiry and process skills, such as observing, comparing, hypothesizing, experimenting, and communicating. The suggested activities are replicable in elementary classrooms. Throughout the book, the authors argue for a learner-centered pedagogy that encourages students to think creatively and constructively. The book has five chapters, and each chapter has a list of questions at the end, which can provide guidance for teachers and prospective teachers to engage students in mathematics and science learning. This is a valuable resource for mathematics and science educators. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections.
Sometimes it seems that far too many students finish elementary school lacking good knowledge of math and science. They often say these were their least favorite subjects. Part of the problem is that often their teachers feel the same way and pass their dislike along to their students. The authors would like teachers and prospective teachers to be more enthusiastic about teaching math and science, and thus they have written these guidelines for that purpose. . . .This book lives up to the authors’ intent to '…deepen the conversation, challenge thinking, and provide some up–to–date tools for teachers so that they can help reverse the steady erosion of math, science, and technological skills in the general population.'
I found the discussion of the nature of mathematics [in this book] to be a powerful tool, allowing teachers, new and experienced, to reflect on what mathematics really is and providing a foundation for change.
Teaching Math, Science, and Technology in Schools Today is very teacher friendly, well organized, and consistent in format and style. The guidelines that it presents provide a useful and thought provoking outline for conversation and consideration by faculty and administrative groups interested in improving achievement in mathematics, science, and technology by creating and environment of engagement and discourse among all students.
This book lives up to the authors' intent to 'deepen the conversation, challenge thinking, and provide some up-to-date tools for teachers so that they can help reverse the steady erosion of math, science, and technological skills in the general population."
In their newest collaboration, educational mentors Dennis Adams and Mary Hamm enthusiastically embrace the challenge of the Common Core Curriculum Standards to meet our rapidly changing world. Coupling innovative activities with differentiated instruction, Adams and Hamm have created a teacher-friendly reference that makes use of imagination, movement, sound, and humor – which are elements of creative thinking and critical in our rapidly evolving world.
Adams and Hamm focus on creativity and innovation in teaching math, science, and technology. The book points out the importance of original thinking while providing activities that help students express themselves in many ways. The book also does an excellent job of focusing and helping both eager and reluctant learners to achieve academic success. A major strength is providing methods teachers can use to make sense of the world they live in. As a teacher in the 21st century, I know that it is important that students are given the opportunity to reflect and be open to new ideas, and this book is beneficial in realizing this approach.
As a 'reluctant teacher' myself, when it came to teach subjects that were not my strength, I was thrilled to find a book that made me feel I could teach math, science, and technology without needing to be extremely proficient or even fascinated with the subjects. By allowing the students to show the way through collaborative work, everyone can realize they have the skill and knowledge to be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. We all come to the table with something to offer. The activities offered in the second edition of Teaching Math, Science, and Technology in SchoolsToday: Guidelines for Engaging Both Eager and Reluctant Learners are reality-based and open-ended, allowing for wonder, exploration, and innovative solutions. Whether used directly by teachers in the classroom or as a teaching tool for professional development, both reluctant teachers and struggling students will find success and a new love for these 21st century skills by following the guidance offered within these pages.
This book does an excellent job of helping teachers structure their classes in a way that leads to intellectual curiosity, collaboration, and creative thinking. Adams and Hamm provide thought provoking and sometimes different viewpoints for helping reluctant, math-anxious, and eager students succeed. The authors utilize the latest research yet display an uncanny, classical sense of Piagetian assimilation and accommodation in their constructivist approach.
