With school holidays approaching in many parts of Australia, I thought it was timely to recommend some holiday reading for primary teachers of mathematics. Last year I wrote a blog titled Keeping up with the current that focused on three mathematics education research articles for teachers to explore. The current blog provides a few recent…
This week’s blog is inspired by research that James Russo, Toby Russo, and Leicha Bragg have recently conducted (and will present at the upcoming MERGA online conference) about factors that influence the mathematical games teachers’ choose. They propose a number of factor themes related to why teachers choose specific games – I will utilise these themes to share a…
Teaching is hard work, and learning isn’t easy. It is time to appreciate the complexity of the job and to talk about the real purpose of education, to improve student learning. Actually, it could be better phrased as to improve an individual’s learning. Something that all teachers work hard to achieve. To help students move…
In light of last week’s SMH article by Jordan Baker regarding private tutoring, I thought this would be a good opportunity to expand on some of the current thinking and discourse surrounding this topic. Being ‘for’ or ‘against’ tutoring is not the ultimate focus for this blog. In fact, as with many aspects of education, it…
We have slow TV, slow fashion and even slow food, but what about slow teaching?
If learning is an active process, what does that mean for me as the teacher and what is my role in the classroom?
Talking and listening in the classroom is really the bread and butter of what we do as teachers and learners. While we, the formal assessors, together with the world at large (including parents), might value the written word over talk, and certainly accept the written word for evidence of learning (appropriately constructed, of course), it…
Programming your practices As the year draws to an end for most schools, planning for 2019 is beginning already. I thought it would be good to highlight some of the ‘buzz words’, concepts or ideas that are having an impact in mathematics classrooms. When planning for mathematics at this time of the year, spend the…
Dialogic teaching, a term created by Dr Robin Alexander in the early 2000s, harnesses the power of talk to stimulate and extend students’ thinking and advance their learning and understanding.
Students need all teachers and carers in their lives across their schooling life to be passionate about mathematics, its usefulness and its beauty, and every students’ ability to improve in mathematics. Only when all our attitudes towards mathematics change will we see students’ confidence and choices regarding mathematics change.