Enhancing Adaptive and Inventive Thinking with Innovative Pedagogical Strategies in a Mathematics Classroom

In this workshop we will be practicing in two innovative pedagogical strategies for enhancing students’ thinking skills that employers highly value. The first deals with adaptive thinking, which is crucial in our rapidly changing world of information and misinformation. Fake news, conspiracy theories, information wars and deep fakes are getting more common nowadays. Therefore, improving students’ abilities to recognise mistakes and reduce their susceptibility to misinformation is very important. The first strategy suggests including so-called provocative questions in teaching and assessment. Such questions look like routine ones, but they have a catch – they are deliberately designed to mislead the solver. The intention is to better prepare and adapt students for real life by transferring their critical thinking skills outside the classroom. The second strategy deals with inventive thinking and it suggests regularly using non-routine problems like puzzles, paradoxes, and sophisms as a pedagogical intervention. The so-called Puzzle-Based Learning (PzBL) approach effectively enhanced creativity and inventive thinking. It illustrates generic problem-solving principles that can be applied in different areas and disciplines. Many high-tech companies use puzzles at their job interviews to evaluate candidates' creative problem-solving skills and select the best. There is a parallel between PzBL and TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving), a powerful systematic problem-solving approach that originated from analysing patterns of invention. Results of several surveys of school teachers and examples of the use of the above pedagogical strategies will be presented at the workshop. We will be creating provocative questions and sharing your examples. We will also discuss several puzzles and generic problem-solving principles illustrated by them. We will consider practical recommendations for teaching practice and professional development. Active participation of the audience is expected and encouraged.

Learning Outcomes:‍

On the completion of the workshop participants will enhance their skills in:

• Critically assessing new problem and question the question before trying to solve it.
• Carefully analysing all conditions and constraints of the problem before employing a certain procedure/formula/theorem to solve it.
• Adapting generic problem-solving strategies and principles to solve novel problems in unfamiliar context.
• Applying both convergent and divergent thinking in various non-routine problems.
• Employing the above skills in their teaching practice.

Target Audience: Mathematics Teachers and Key Personnel of all levels