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