Teaching Mathematics with Creativity

Abstract

This article explores and reviews the literature about the latest research-based teaching and learning techniques or strategies that are used by some of the most passionate and enthusiastic classroom teachers, often for the purpose of enlightening, firing up, or illuminating classroom lessons in order to grab students’ immediate attention, curiosity, and overall interest in the learning process. The question used to guide our exploration of the literature is: How do effective classroom teachers manage to always create a conducive, welcoming, and exciting rather than depressive learning environment? While the current research output is more often than not forward-looking, that is, it is too busy moving forward as it comes up daily with suggested new ways of teaching and learning, almost nothing or little attention is given to what is already available, discovered, or recorded. This means there is an implication that a valuable knowledge domain already discovered could remain largely un-utilized, an unused knowledge domain that is already available in the recorded literature, which can be put into practice in classroom settings. Therefore, this review article highlights some of the latest, creative, and effective teaching techniques that the authors explored and found impressive. These are effective strategies that might be otherwise overlooked, overshadowed, or blurred; but they are effective techniques that can be utilized by the most passionate and enthusiastic classroom teachers for the purpose of making mathematics attractive to all types of learners, often by the ways of generating, stimulating, and/or maintaining students’ interest in the mathematics subject matter.