How to Teach Maths
Understanding Learners' Needs

How to Teach Maths challenges everything you thought you knew about how maths is taught in classrooms. Award-winning author Steve Chinn casts a critical eye over many of the long-established methods and beliefs of maths teaching. Drawing from decades of classroom experience and research, he shows how mathematics teaching across the whole ability range can be radically improved by learning from the successful methods and principles used for the bottom quartile of achievers: the outliers. Chinn guides readers through re-adjusting the presentation of maths to learners, considering learners? needs first, and explains the importance of securing early learning to create a conceptual foundation for later success.

This highly accessible book uses clear diagrams and examples to support maths teachers through many critical issues, including the following:

• The context of maths education today
• Topics that cause students the most difficulty
• Effective communication in the mathematics classroom
• Addressing maths anxiety

The perfect resource for maths teachers at all levels, this book is especially useful for those wanting to teach the foundations of mathematics in a developmental way to learners of all ages and abilities. It has the potential to change the way maths is taught forever.

1. Where we are with maths education 2. Key identifiers of future and current maths difficulties 3. The core curriculum for arithmetic 4. The developmental nature of maths 5. Topics which cause the most difficulty 6. Learner characteristics and key skills 7. Meta-cognition 8. Linking facts and concepts 9. The role of language, vocabulary and symbols: Communication and perspectives on communication 10. The inconsistencies of maths and their impact on learning 11. How to use materials and visual images 12. Two visual methods 13. Anxiety and withdrawal 14. Assessment and diagnosis of mathematical difficulties 15. Classroom management 16. Bringing it all together

Steve Chinn is a Visiting Professor at the University of Derby. He is the author of The Trouble with Maths and More Trouble with Maths and the editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Dyscalculia and Mathematical Learning Difficulties. He has lectured and provided teacher training in over 30 countries. He founded, and ran for two decades, an award-winning school for learners with specific learning difficulties.