Warm-ups in Math Education

"So, Mr. Longo, based on your research and personal philosophy, what is the purpose of warm-ups in your classroom?"

The question really has two answers. The first has to do with classroom management. If I am able to get students into the classroom and immediately on task, the first few minutes of class that are usually lost doing attendance are no longer lost, but gained as valulable instruction time that not only increases a student's contact with the content, but also gets them in the correct mindset for the rest of class thereby encouraging positive behavior during class.

The second, has to do with the student's learning more directly. Warm-ups can be used for a variety of reasons: I may want to activate prior knowledge so that I can get the day's lesson moving easily without having to review content as I go; I may want to address a common gap that came up while grading a quiz or a homework, I can put a similar problem on the warm-up and do it with the students as a group; I can use it in conjunction with current content and test taking strategies - I will sometimes use content that I know that the kids are doing well with and frame questions in the style of a standardized test...this way I'm able to accomplish my management goal but also reinforce or help teach students strategies that will help them on standardized tests later in the year. Also, let's say for the sake of argument that I wanted to teach students how to find the internal angle measures of irregular polygons. I would probably put a series of questions on the warm-up that contained finding the internal angle measures of regular polygons and finding missing angle measures in irregular triangles. I could then mash these two skills together during the lesson and have students on the same page as me as soon as I start the lesson.

"I hope that answers your question Mr..."