Why we say this

We agree that teachers need a profound understanding of fundamental mathematics. When you teach through context you realise just how much more maths there is that we never learnt at school. It is important that context isn’t forced and students can make a connection between the mathematics and the contexts.When you teach through rich contexts the mathematics that arises crosses curriculum boundaries and involves concepts that may  not arise from a curriculum – focused approach.

Mathematics itself is also a context. Knowing the “culture of mathematics” might be important in engaging students in learning and doing mathematics for the sake of doing mathematics.

Prior to Make it Count, most of the teachers were teaching in a relatively traditional way and just teaching surface level curriculum in the way that they (themselves) learnt it.