Activities & Materials
Mr. L and Mathematics Outside of the Math Class
Mr. L is the writing partner of Brad Fulton. In 1995 they formed Teacher to Teacher Press, a mathematics book publishing and consulting business. They are frequent presenters at math conferences throughout the United States. Brad and Bill have authored over a dozen books that provide easy-to-teach yet mathematically-rich activities for busy teachers. In addition, they have co-authored more than two dozen teacher training manuals full of activities and ideas that help teachers who believe mathematics must be both meaningful and powerful.
What this Means to the Student
Students learn from experience and relate new information to that which they already know. It’s important to link all new concepts in a way that is meaningful and coherent so that learning is maximized. All the activities that Mr. L uses in class are designed to stimulate the creative problem-solving process so that students are actively involved and will want to learn. Teaching problem solving in a creative way requires a lot of preparation and effort, in many cases much more than “traditional” teaching out of a standard textbook. The activities that are used will most likely look different than students have seen before, and Mr. L requires commitment to learning from all his students. The payoff is high when students “learn how to learn” and think about their thinking (metacognition).
Mr. L uses many of the activities from Teacher to Teacher Press because they are pedagogically rich and accomplish a large number of goals in a single setting. In addition to covering the California math standards, they encourage writing skills, precise thinking, and creative problem-solving through the process of conceptual layering. Conceptual layering is a teaching process whereby material is presented in such a way that students are allowed to see the relationships between new information and the information they already possess. In this way, they can construct meaning for themselves and retain concepts, structure, and algorithmic skills longer.