Teaching fractions and ratios for understanding - Essential Content Knowledge and Instuctional Strategies for Teachers

This popular text, Teaching Fractions and Ratios for Understanding, addresses the urgent need for curriculum materials that cross traditional boundaries to include many of the elements that are integrated in the teaching/learning enterprise: mathematics content, teacher understanding, student thinking, teaching methods, instructional activities, and assessment. The book pushes readers beyond the limits of their current understanding of rational numbers, challenging them to refine and explain their thinking-without falling back on rules and procedures they have relied on throughout their lives. Written in a conversational and easy-to-understand style, this is not a textbook as much as it is a resource book. An underlying assumption is that facilitating teacher understanding using the same questions and activities that may be used with children is one way to help teachers build the comfort and confidence they need to begin talking to children about complex ideas. Unlike a textbook that is used to study format theory and then discarded when it cornes to putting ideas into practice, the many problems and activities included to facilitate teacher leaming are valuable resources for use in elementary and middle school classrooms.