Four Great Resources For Math Teachers, Now Free

From our friends at the Shell Centre:

The aim of Shell Centre Publications has always been to ensure that a number of seminal works in the field of mathematical education remained available. We have now reached the point where our most popular items are out of stock, and have come to the decision that it is time to stop storing and selling physical books. Digital distribution is the best way to keep these works available, so in the coming months, we will be making many of the publications on our list available, for free, as PDF downloads.

These books are just great. The Language of Functions and Graphs, in particular, has a couple of career’s worth of great activities, lesson plans, and essays on teaching functions. Highly recommended.

[via Michael Pershan]

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I'm Dan and this is my blog. I'm a former high school math teacher and current head of teaching at Desmos. He / him. More here.

10 Comments

  1. I’ve had those books in my Evernote files for a while now. They were resources that I saved and tagged with the intention of going back through them when I needed resources on functions. I will definitely look at them more closely.
    As long as we are praising the Shell Centre, the Download Materials tab contains some great resources as well.
    And as long as we are sharing resources from the UK, their National Stem Centre is an EXCELLENT treasure trove of oldies but goodies. http://www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/
    In fact, most of these downloads from the Shell Centre are also available on the Stem Centre site.
    A personal favorite is the collection from the Nuffield Foundation:
    http://www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/elibrary/maths/search?facet%5B0%5D=subject%3A%22Mathematics%22&facet%5B1%5D=publisher%3A%22Nuffield+Foundation%22&order=score&filter=C
    Additionally the SMILE collections are amazing:
    http://www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/elibrary/maths/search?facet%5B0%5D=subject%3A%22Mathematics%22&facet%5B1%5D=publisher%3A%22SMILE%22&order=score&filter=C

  2. Roberto Catanuto

    March 7, 2014 - 1:16 am -

    Great news, I’ve been using their MARS assessment project for about a year, and yes it’s great.

    Can’t wait to diving deeper into these new resources.

    Best,
    Roberto.

  3. While we’re raving about STEM, here’s some excellent stuff to make mechanics even more interesting. Over in the UK there’s no coursework so a lot of this has fallen by the wayside. Such a shame.

    Skip the first bit and get onto the experiments and demonstrations.

    Thanks for the Shell stuff – that photocopying bill is going up and up!

  4. Adam Poetzel

    March 8, 2014 - 8:15 pm -

    Many years ago as a first year math teacher, a respected veteran in my department showed me this book and we used many of the tasks and problems in our Algebra classes. As a new teacher, using the tasks in this book really helped me to understand what it meant to have students “create arguments and critique the reasoning of others”. Math reasoning was alive and well as students engaged with the interesting scenarios and representations in this book. Thank you Shell Centre!!! (and thanks to that veteran teacher for taking me under her wing!)

  5. I find it most interesting to note the copyright of these materials – 1985. Anticipating Common Core 30 years ago!

  6. It’d be great if someone (or everyone) can suggest the most useful books from this site for each subject, for those of us without either time or expertise to sort through the resources. I know it’s a lot to ask, so I’d be very grateful.

  7. Dan and Michael,

    Wow! Thanks for letting us know about the rich treasure trove of quality materials from the Shell Centre! Everything that I’ve seen from them has been great.