Intended Audience:  Teachers, prospective teachers, and parents (public, private, homeschool).

In this video, 7 year old Autumn leads an audience of about 100 teachers in doing arithmetic problems.  Watch her explain how she uses different methods to solve problems other than the “standard column math” method (algorithms), and allow me to explain why it is important to build curricula that encourage all of these methods.

You may not have realized this, but in all the Growing up with Eureka videos, Autumn has always been a co-teacher; She is not my student in these videos.  She knows that we are creating videos for adults (teachers, parents, educators, etc.) to give them ideas to use with their children–you are our students! 🙂

Autumn and I have always treated each other as partners in setting up and making each video.  This partnership may be hard to believe because Autumn is only 7, but I think this video shows just how true this is.  Much of the partnership is “behind the scene,” which may or may not manifest itself in each video, but the live audience presentation hints at what that partnerhsip looks like.  Enjoy.

The main message of the presentation is that, as teachers, we should have an articulable reason (at least to ourselves) as to why we are asking our students to understand a different solution method to a given problem, and that reason is most often due to the mathematical content and not necessarily the pedagogy.  This is an important distinction, because we know that, as professionals, we are more likely to make a choice to teach a different method if we know that we are making that choice based upon content.

As always, comments are welcomed.

CHANNEL: Growing up with Eureka
© 2015 Autumn Baldridge and Scott Baldridge
Partially supported by NSF CAREER grant DMS-0748636