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This episode we’re speaking with Michael Pershan. Michael is an incredibly passionate, informed, and prolific maths teacher and blogger in the US. When it comes to education research, Michael has a hunger for the truth that I really admire. This curiosity has led Michael down a multitude of educational rabbit holes that have resulted in him being perhaps the best read classroom teacher that I know. But equally as importantly, Michael is fun, he brings a wonderful youthfulness to his educational explorations, and his tweets always bring a smile to my face through their mix of incisiveness and humour.
Here is an example of Michaels characteristic tweets.
- Tweet 1: Thank god there aren’t upper and lowercase numbers.
- Tweet 2: For $1, 000, 000, I will share my money making secret.
- Tweet 3: Robots will make terrific teachers as soon as people want to live up to the expectations of robots.
I don’t know how Michael comes up with this gold, but he does, over and over again! These three tweets, for example, were all written by Michael within the space of three days!
The reason why Michael is on the ERRR podcast today is that he’s just come out with an absolutely superb book entitled, Teaching Math with Examples.
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If you’re a maths teacher, and if you think that you teach with worked examples, as I did, then this book will blow your mind. Even after writing a book on Cognitive Load Theory, and scouring the research on Worked Examples, the insights offered in Michael’s book still offered fresh and valuable insights and, as I say at the end of the podcast, This is the publication that has had the single biggest impact on my mathematics teaching practice to date.
I can’t recommend Michaels book highly enough. And I hope that you enjoy hearing us discuss some of the finer points therein, within this episode.
Is this just one for the maths teachers? It may seem that way, but I would argue that there are many ideas shared within that apply to all teaching. One of the fantastic things that Michael does in his book, and in this interview, is bring teaching strategies back to the principles that underlie them. Within our discussion, Michael particularly talks about the principles that underlie learning from examples, self-explanation, and feedback. These ideas apply irrespective of the domain in which you teach.
Links/resources mentioned in the show
- Michael's book, Teaching Math with Examples
- Michael's blog on feedback
- Tweeter: Catriona Geometry Puzzles
- Book: Craig Barton’s How I Wish I’d Taught Maths
- Ilana Horn, Vanderbilt University, Book on Motivation
- Marylin Burns, Wsa important person in progressive maths education in the US. Wrote a tonne of books. One of the best writers of classroom dialogues. The book is… Lessons for introducing Fractions
- Book: Paul Tough, Whatever it Takes
- Julie Booth article, A worked example for creating worked examples
- Website, Multiplication by heart
- Also see Ollie's book: Cognitive Load Theory in Action
- Australia – Woodslane Publishing
- UK – John Catt Publishing UK
- US – John Catt US
- Everywhere else – (See your country’s Amazon store)
This episode of the ERRR Podcast is brought to you by John Catt Educational. Use this link along with the code provided within the podcast to get 30% off all books from John Catt Educational! https://www.johncattbookshop.com/books/errr
Listen to all past episodes of the ERRR podcast here.