At St Ambrose Parish School, our teachers are focused on exploring better ways of teaching and learning Mathematics. We are embracing new ways to teach Maths with the vision to develop students as learners who can think for themselves critically and creatively, not students who wait to be told what to do.
This is an adjustment for teachers and students in how some lessons will be presented. We will be planning lessons that are structured to maximise engagement of all students through differentiation. Each week we will incorporate some open ended tasks and follow an approach that fosters Maths learning through a ‘launch, explore and consolidate’ approach.
You can expect that there will be time planned where students will be given a task without instruction and expected to think about what they need to do, what they already know and what strategies they can use to work on the task. ‘Think time’ is crucial for students’ development, thinking is learning. Every student will begin with the same task but differentiation will quickly occur and continue throughout the lesson to support and extend the students’ learning as needed.
The lesson structure has a sequence design where students begin with a warm up activity that will connect with the lesson topic, then they will be presented with a task without teacher instruction. After time to work on this task, students will share, discuss, and reflect to consolidate the initial learning and transfer that learning to other tasks.
Throughout the year students have been enjoying a more hands-on approach to learning Maths and opportunities to share their thinking.
