In order for teachers to increase their effectiveness, it is helpful to explore how communication relates to developing understanding of mathematical concepts. Our own experience with mathematics may have been driven by examples or formulas presented by a teacher and applied in a series of textbook exercises. Often we apply a formula without a real understanding of its origin or the meaning of the underlying mathematical concept.

In this section, we will concentrate on both your approach to a problem and how you communicate your thinking to others, using pictures, oral and written language, and numbers.

The following problem requires you to come up with a formula for finding the area of a given figure. As you work on the problem, think about how you are approaching it, what difficulties you are encountering, how you would communicate your thinking to others, and the strategy you ultimately use to solve the problem.

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