The Jordan Math Work system offers a modern approach to teaching math to K-8 students, both in the classroom and at home. It focuses on allowing students to learn at their own pace and apply their unique learning styles, building a strong mathematical foundation before moving on to more advanced topics. While this approach seems straightforward, tailoring math instruction to best meet individual student needs is often replaced with a “one-size-fits-all” method that unfortunately leaves many students behind.
The Jordan Math Work system embraces a modern take on math instruction, replacing rote lectures and drills with more engaging lesson resources, including hands-on activities, visual aids, and games. The core idea is to give students as many opportunities as possible to engage in deep mathematical thinking, helping them to truly understand math topics (rather than relying on memorization through repetition).
Whether you are a teacher or a parent looking to use the Jordan Math Work system with your children, here are a few practical tips you can apply:
- Explore First: In the Jordan Math Work system, a student’s first exposure to any new topic should be in the form of manipulation through hands-on or virtual activities. By allowing children to “play” with mathematical concepts, they can develop a deep and meaningful understanding that teachers can then build upon. For example, before teaching students how to add numbers, teachers can give them objects like jelly beans so they can use them to combine totals and perform addition before learning the actual procedure.
- Continue with Visuals: Once students have had ample opportunities to explore a math topic hands-on, they are ready to expand their understanding of that concept to visual representations. This means introducing drawings, diagrams, and/or pictures that represent a topic. To reuse the addition example, students can begin looking at drawings of groups of jelly beans being combined, which forces them to mentally find the sum.
- Conclude with Abstract Understanding: Though many teachers start at this step, the Jordan Math Work system delays the use of 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 have already gained a solid foundational understanding of a topic that they can then expand to working with numbers, symbols, formulas, and mathematical procedures. For the addition example, this is the stage where you would introduce the plus sign and teach the methods of adding numbers together.
- Real World Application: It doesn’t mean much for your students to develop a deep conceptual and procedural understanding of a topic if the skill they have learned does not hold any real-world value. In this stage, teachers can create and share interesting real-world problems and scenarios that require the application of a newly learned math skill. This stage is critical as it contextualizes math and helps students understand why math skills are so important. For example, after students have mastered the procedures associated with addition, they can then do projects related to real-world applications such as shopping, driving, or building.
- Feedback Loop: Throughout every stage of the Jordan Math Work system, open communication between students, teachers, and parents is paramount. Teachers should continually assess student progress, identify areas for improvement, and evaluate which strategies best suit individual student needs. This constant attention to communication and feedback ensures that every student is set up to succeed in math.
- Inspire, Inspire, Inspire! While structured instruction and learning experiences serve as the foundation of the Jordan Math Work system, it is equally crucial to provide students with opportunities to explore and pursue math applications that particularly interest them. Students should never be taught that there is only one way to solve a problem and should be encouraged to be creative and open-minded when problem-solving. The role of teachers and parents is to expose students to open-ended problems that require students to think critically and creatively.
The Jordan Math Work system is a dynamic approach to teaching math to K-8 students. The system’s method focuses on helping students develop a well-rounded understanding of mathematics, stemming from conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, and real-world connections. By teaching a math topic first through hands-on experience and visual representations, then gradually to procedural concepts and then real-world applications, students can develop a 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 in providing young students with a well-rounded, engaging, and holistic learning experience that benefits them in higher grades in the future.
