2017 Must be the Year You Transform to a Mentor

Enormous changes are happening with the Teaching & Learning of maths. It’s the same throughout education globally.

But when you’re in it: you often can’t see it; or feel it. 

Each year seems to be the same … only the faces of this year’s classes have changed from last year's.

A few years ago, I discussed collaborative problem-solving in mathematics with Professor Tom Seidenberg from Philips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, US. Every subject is taught there collaboratively by a teacher/mentor around a Harkness oval table.

The Harkness method has been the Exeter pedagogy for 87 years. It’s also been a model for many other very progressive schools.

The maths faculty has written hundreds of problems which you can access on the Exeter website (www.exeter.edu). These problems are the basis for the collaborative lessons.

I was inspired by Professor Seidenberg and Harkness. So much so that I started MathsRepublic for teachers to connect with their students through collaborative problem-solving.

You can support the vision by trialling MathsRepublic FREE and then being invited to subscribe. That’s the easy part.

The hard part is breaking through that resistance to change … a characteristic shared by all humans when change is happening all around them.

But this is the time when Real Teachers emerge. These are teachers who recognise that T&L is an evolution but now accelerated by technology or EduTech to reach warp speed.

Real teachers know that it’s the students that matter. They acknowledge that students today were all born into the Web World…that they interact from an early age with the web and social connections.

There surely must be a new model of teacher/student connectivity for learning.

We believe that putting Harkness in the Cloud through MathsRepublic will introduce all Teachers to collaborative problem-solving.

And to then engage in Real Teaching with your amazing students.