whole brain teaching: long division
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Rejoice! Mastering long division is no more difficult than being a world class tennis player or becoming an International Chess Grand Master. Just kidding! Read this document and discover how to use practice techniques employed by champions ... to teach your kids long division. For more information on Whole Brain Teaching and to access thousands of pages of free downloads, go to WholeBrainTeaching.com.TRANSCRIPT
Q. How do you teach long division? Chris Biffle Director, Whole Brain Teachers of America Long division and writing essays are the two most challenging skills in elementary school … for the same reason. Both require mastering a substantial collection of micro skills. To write essays well, students need to understand capitalization, punctuation, topic sentences, detail sentences, word spacing, spelling, the difference between proper and common nouns, the difference between active and passive verbs, how to use adjectives to modify nouns, correct form for quotations, etc. Long division requires perfect knowledge of 100+ multiplication facts, 100+ subtraction facts and the complex, five step, long division process. Whew! In some ways, long division is more difficult than writing essays … unlike composition, if you make a single mistake in long division the whole exercise is ruined. Double Whew! Understand that mastering any complex skill requires hours and hours of practicing micro skills … but Whole Brain Teaching turns this process into a lively entertainment. Here are the steps. (All the webcasts noted below are found at http://www.livestream.com/wholebrainteaching1/folder) 1. Your students are fluent in WBT’s Core Four: Class-‐Yes (Webcast 557), Mirror Words (Webcast 558), Teach-‐Okay, (Webcast 516) and the Scoreboard (Webcast 562). Classroom tested by tens of thousands of instructors, these four strategies provide a powerful, entertaining framework for any lesson.
2. Students have perfectly mastered multiplication and subtraction math facts using SuperSpeed Math (Webcast 540). 3. Use Mirror Words and Teach-‐Okay to teach your children the mnemonic Dirty Monkeys Smell Bad … Really. This stands for divide, multiply, subtract, bring down … remainder. Use a gesture for each term. Dirty (rub your dirty arms), Monkeys (scratch under your arms and make monkey sounds) Smell (hold your nose), Bad (thumbs down), … Really (the dots stand for a pause … remainder comes at the very end. Grab your little finger and shake it … signaling that the remainder comes at the conclusion of the previous four operations). 4. Students must know what to do, before they do it! They must master long division theory, before engaging in long division practice. In other words, your kids must understand each step in the long division process before they practice the steps. Step One: show a series of simple division problems (hopefully, you have a computer projector). Tell kids to teach each other the first step in each problem … problem after problem after problem. Kids should say what they should do … divide this number into that number … without actually performing the division. Step Two: show kids problem after problem with the first step performed. They should explain to each other exactly what to do next, multiply this number by that number … without actually doing it. Learning the steps is much easier if you don’t have to actually perform them. Step Three: Show students problem after problem and now they explain the first two steps.
Step Four: Show kids tons of problems with the first two steps completed. They should explain to each other what the third step is … over and over. Concluding Steps: Follow this same procedure all the way through the long division process until they are ready to explain when and how to create a remainder. 5. Congratulations! Now, your kids truly understand all the stages in long division … long division theory. Now, go back through the sequence again and kids explain a step to each other … and actually perform the operation. Over and over. Lots of reps, one step at a time. 6. Now, kids can start working together solving division problems … and learning, micro skill by micro skill, how to check for the accuracy of their solution. Note that this process of repeated practice of small steps is exactly what champions use to perfect their skills. If you’re a chess player, you spend hundreds of hours mastering openings, actually hundreds of hours mastering one kind of opening (there are over 50). Then you work on your middle game, mating combinations, defensive alignments, pawn tactics, castling strategies, pins and sacrifices etc. If you are a great tennis player you practice thousands of reps on each micro skill involved in serving … ball toss, racquet downswing, racquet extension, wrist turn, ball contact, leg bend, follow through. Then you go on to forehand, backhand, lob, net play, baseline work … thousands of reps in each micro skill. We have enormous quantities of research detailing how champions practice. The scientific literature points to the same conclusion … perfect each micro skill and the macro skill takes care of itself!
Rejoice. You don’t have to teach long division. Teaching long division is way too hard. Just teach your kids every micro skill. With enough reps, they will learn how to divide multi-‐digit numbers by multi-‐digit numbers. And you will take another micro step closer to Teaching Heaven. -‐-‐ please send a link to this document to 1,000 colleagues.