Is the Jordan’s Math Work System Right for Your Students?
The Jordan Math Work system is a 21st century method for teaching math to children in grades K-8 both in the classroom and at home. As mentioned earlier, the system relies on giving students opportunities to apply their unique learning styles and learn at their preferred pace so that they can develop strong foundational math skills before advancing onto more challenging topics. While this approach seems simple enough, the importance of tailoring math instruction to best meet students’ individual needs is often replaced with a one-size-fits-all approach that sadly leaves many students behind.
The Jordan’s Math Work system takes a modern approach to math instruction that replaces lectures and repetitive practice worksheets with more engaging lesson resources that include hands-on activities, visual aids, and games. The main idea is to give students as many opportunities as possible to engage in deep mathematical thinking so that they truly understand math topics (rather than relying on memorization through repetition).
Whether you are a teacher or a parent looking to utilize the Jordan Math Work system with your kids, here are a few practical tips that you can apply in conjunction with the free resources shared above:
Explore First: In the Jordan Math Work system, students’ first exposure to any new topic should be in the form of manipulation through either hands-on or virtual activities. By allowing kids to “play with” math concepts, they are able to develop deep and meaningful understanding that teachers can then build upon. For example, before teaching students how to add numbers, they can give them objects such as jellybeans that they can use to combine sums and perform addition before they learn the actual procedure.
Continue with Images: Once students have had plenty of opportunities to explore a math topic in a hands-on way, they are ready to extend that conceptual understanding to pictorial representations. This means introducing drawings, diagrams, and/or pictures that represent a topic. To use the addition example again, students can begin looking at drawings of groups of jellybeans being combined, which forces them to find a sum mentally.
Finish with Abstract Understanding: While many teachers start at this step, the Jordan’s Math Work system delays the act of using symbols and numbers to perform math until after students have had both hands-on and visual opportunities to explore a math topic. At this stage, students already have a strong foundational understanding of a topic that they can then extend to working with numbers, symbols, formulas, and mathematical procedures. For the addition example, this is the stage where you would introduce the plus symbol and teach methods for adding numbers together.
Real-World Applications: Having your students develop a deep conceptual and procedural understanding of a topic doesn’t mean much if the skill they have learned does not have any perceived value in the real world. In this stage, teachers can create and share interesting real-world problems and scenarios that require the application of a newly learned math skill. The stage is important because it contextualizes mathematics and helps students to understand why math skills are so important. For example, after students have mastered the procedures associated with addition, they can take on projects involving real-world applications such as shopping, driving, or building.
The Feedback Loop: Throughout every stage of the Jordan Math Work system, open communication between students, teachers, and parents is extremely important. Teachers should constantly be evaluating student progress, determining areas in need of improvement, and assessing which strategies are best suited to each individual student’s needs. This constant attention to communication and feedback ensures that every student is set up to be successful in mathematics.
Inspire, Inspire, Inspire! While structured instruction and learning experiences serve as the foundation of the Jordan Math Work system, it is also important to give students opportunities to explore and seek out applications of mathematics that are particularly interesting to them. Students should never be taught that there is only one way to solve a problem and they should be encouraged to be creative and open-minded when solving problems. It is the role of the teacher and the parent to expose students to math problems that are open-ended and require students to think critically and creatively.
The Jordan Math Work system is a dynamic approach to teaching math to students in grades K-8. The system’s approach is focused on helping students to develop a well-rounded understanding of mathematics that is rooted in conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, and real-world associations. By teaching a math topic first through hands-on experiences and pictorial representations and then gradually to procedural concepts and then real-world applications, students can develop deep understanding and think about a topic in creative and critical ways. With the combined efforts of parents at home and teachers in the classroom, Jordan’s Math Work system is highly effective for giving young students a well-rounded, engaging, and comprehensive learning experience that will benefit them at higher levels of education in the future.
