Concept-Based Teaching in Mathematics

Some members of my team and I were recently meeting with the IB subject manager for Maths HL assessment. She mentioned that one possible development for the next round of curriculum updates (pdf, IB OCC login required) is a greater focus on inquiry learning and concept-based teaching. When we started discussing this I realised I don’t really know what concept-based teaching looks like in maths. Do you?

I am just beginning my learning journey about concept-based teaching in maths. Here are my stops so far.

Jennifer Wathall has written a book about concept-based maths – it will be published in 2016. I knew Jennifer when I worked in Hong Kong and I attended workshops given by her. I think it is likely to be a very practical and useful book.

This brief blog post by Jeff Hadad argues that the idea of concept-based learning is a good one for maths teachers.

The blog post above links to a book called How Children Learn: Mathematics in the Classroom by the US National Research Council (free download).

Here is a short article by an MYP teacher that gives an example of concept-based learning using simultaneous equations.

What can you share about concept-based mathematics?