I wrote this manual for ABE math instructors who, like me, are interested in changing their teaching practice to bring it more in line with recommendations from the research literature on teaching numeracy to adults. I wrote it after consulting with more than 100 people in British Columbia about their practice, and I wrote it to address the concerns they expressed to me at those consultations. The manual sets out some "best practices" from the literature, then outlines some difficulties instructors may face in implementing them, and makes suggestions for overcoming the difficulties. Finally, there are many pages of activities ready for immediate classroom use, which provide examples of some ways of implementing the best practices.
Chapter 1 describes the process I engaged in to consulting the literature and the field. When I consulted instructors, they said they were most interested in increasing their use of four strategies for teaching math: hands-on learning, group work, using real-life situations for teaching math, and giving students responsibility for their learning. They said that student resistance and time constraints figured large among the barriers they faced to using those strategies.
Chapter 2 finds us facing up squarely to the first of those barriers: resistance to changing traditional math practice. Since we cannot deal with resistance unless we deal with emotions, Chapter 3 talks about emotions in teaching and learning math.
Those two topics out of the way, Chapter 4 deals with hands-on learning, using manipulatives and visual and practical presentations to teach math concepts; Chapter 5 gives many examples of group activities that can be used with students who don’t have well-developed group skills; Chapter 6 takes on the questions of real-life math, building on the basis of strategies in the previous chapters; and Chapter 7 goes on to discuss strategies for putting students in charge of their own learning.