There have been many reformers offering ideas for improving numeracy in our schools. Many of them advocate the use of specific commercial resources or explicit lesson plans – in short they offer recipes for teachers and schools to follow. The quietly spoken Alistair McIntosh (formerly Associate Professor at the University of Tasmania, Australia) avoided this path – yet identified some key ingredients of successful mathematics teaching. To create a narrative thread through his suggestions he nominated concepts starting with “C”.
For McIntosh the basic principles for improving numeracy teaching included;
focus on important mathematics,
be coherent
and is much more than just a collection of activities.
I’ve taken the liberty of presenting some of the ideas in McIntosh’s brief paper in video form.
This presentation is a condensed version of McIntosh’s ideas. The full paper can be accessed here.
The strength of McIntosh’s ideas is their simplicity – he has provided a lens through which we can view our programs. By considering and including these aspects in our practice we can make progress towards improving numeracy in our schools.
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© 2022 Created by Steve Hargadon.
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