Teaching Math, Science, and Technology in Schools Today

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.

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."

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.