This article offers provocative discussion on how students adapt to new strategy and how flexible they are using them in their mathematical problem solving. From my personal experience, creativity, flexibility, and adaptivity are not isolated from one and another rather they are actually inter-related.
I see adaptivity as the starting point of mathematics learning and teaching. Students will first be able to adapt a strategy to solve certain types of problems and then after they acquire the routine adaptivity, they then can refine the skills in those particular areas. The next step is the flexibility (or “unexpected adaptivity”). Upon mastering the routine adaptivity, one can then develop the flexibility in order to adapt the known strategies to the unfamiliar problems. If students are frequently thrown into unfamiliar situations and are forced to use flexibility in their problem solving, quite often, when students have acquired accuracy in routine adaptivity and confidence in flexibly choosing the right strategies, the sparkle of creativity can be ignited.
Hi Zhi song,
ReplyDeleteI like your idea that students should master adaptivity first.
once students adapt certain strategies then they can deal with unfamiliar situations and think that which strategy will work.In this way they will learn flexibility.