MATHEMATICS: PUTTING KNOWLEDGE INTO PRACTICE

By Anna Gray Year 3 Class Teacher – Primary School

Professor Peter Sullivan has been a champion of Mathematics throughout his career. At the beginning of the school year, he presented to staff and worked with us to reflect on developing and delivering rich mathematical tasks. Peter challenged us to think differently about Mathematics teaching and learning to ensure that all students accessed and extended the concepts and skills. Following these professional learning sessions, team meetings, and in-class support provided by Professor Sullivan, the Year 3 teaching team reflected on our professional knowledge and practice. We did not get everything “correct”, but we continue our journey and enjoy the scope and depth of learning with our students.

The updated format of the Mathematics Planner was initially challenging as the structure seemed large and, at times, onerous within our workload. However, with time and understanding, it has become a clear guide for us—a structure to assist with explicitly teaching content and skills. The Mathematics Padlet has been invaluable, and we highly recommend taking the time to explore its resources. Ensuring that the team clearly understood our learning intentions and success criteria and connected to the ACARA descriptors supported our reflection as a team. Engaging the students in developing success criteria further enhanced our thinking.

We designed our warm-ups to be broad and not necessarily linked to our current content focus. These activities allow us to spiral back and touch on different content areas throughout the year. One warm-up example was a NAPLAN Time question, multiple choice, where students shared which wrong answer some might mistakenly choose and why. Another was an estimation picture of “How many golf balls are in this jar?” When we reflected on successful lessons, we found that lessons we thought could be simple or “too basic” were sometimes the ones that allowed students to learn deeply. A Tuning-In activity, for example, allowed students to describe the features of 3D shapes, leading to an exploration of the consistencies of 3D objects, group thinking, and learning from others. Extending the exploration to patterning within 3D shapes led to generalisations being extended and expressed algebraically.

Although we don’t always have time at the end of a session, the Summarise Reflection time is valuable. A simple sentence stem, like “I now know...” helps cement student understanding.

This year, my mathematics goal was to embed, enable, and extend prompts. Previously, I thought of differentiation in three levels—expected grade level, above, and below—which often meant producing three “levels” of work. This year, I have begun to understand that a good explore task allows me to adjust for enabling and extending. For example, a task to design a U-shaped garden with 56 plants (three arrays in a U-shape) was overwhelming for one student, so she instead used just 24 plants in her arrays.

Anecdotally, we are seeing students’ attitudes towards Mathematics change. Responses to the attitudinal survey included comments such as “challenging but fun” and “My favourite lesson was drawing block towers on isometric dot paper—I didn’t know what to do, but I worked with a friend.”

Our team goal for 2024 is to integrate formative assessment into Mathematics. This year, we relied heavily on summative assessments for continuous reporting, but these were big and possibly less helpful in showing our learning.

Thanks to Lisa, Associate Director of Academic Education – Mathematics, for making this professional learning possible, and thank you to our team of Learning Assistants and ILT for supporting students with additional needs. We have tried to embrace the “You do, we do, I do” mantra, resulting in a year of Mathematics that has been more creative, collaborative, and rigorous than I remember.