Sonia Jones

Becoming a successful teacher of mathematics

Introduction 1.The Nature of the Mathematics Curriculum 11 to 18 2. What Makes a Good Maths Lesson? 3. Managing the Mathematics Classroom 4. Planning and Evaluating a Mathematics Lesson 5. Learning to Think Mathematically 6. misconceptions and Planning to Deal with Them 7. Effective Teaching Approaches 8. How do Children Learn to be numerate? 9. Calculators 10. Learning 11. Assessment and Learning 12. Evaluating and Developing Your Teaching

Using Peer and Self-Assessment to Develop Modeling Skills with Students Aged 11 to 16: A Socio-Constructive View.

Eight Welsh secondary schools participated in an action research project which developed approaches to teaching and assessing mathematical thinking skills involved in practical modelling situations. The development of the metacognitive and strategic skills necessary for successful modelling is discussed from a socio-constructivist perspective as a process of acculturation as well as cognitive construction. Learning to model involves socialization into the consensual realities of a wider mathematical culture and the teacher plays a pivotal role in the generation of this consensus through the legitimization of linguistically expressed subjectivities. Assessment is an integral part of this process. Participation in peer and self-assessment was found to involve the student in a recursive, self-referential learning process which supports the explicit development of metacognitive skills.

SCAFFOLDING FOR SUCCESS: REFLECTIVE DISCOURSE AND THE EFFECTIVE TEACHING OF MATHEMATICAL THINKING SKILLS

This paper describes a research study into the teaching of mathematical thinking skills. Nine classes of students (in total) who had followed a course emphasising metacognitive skills outperformed their control groups on assessments of those skills and were also more successful on measures of their mathematical development. However, participant observation data revealed that there were important variations in teaching style between teachers and the success of their classes varied considerably. Observational data was used to classify the teaching styles into four groups. The teaching styles of the two most successful groups, the ‘dynamic scaffolders’ and the ‘reflective scaffolders’, are analysed here.

Interactive whiteboards and all that jazz: the contribution of musical metaphors to the analysis of classroom activity with interactive technologies

The teacher’s role has often been described as one of ‘orchestration’, and this musical analogy is a powerful one in characterising the manipulation of features in the classroom setting in order to generate activity or ‘performance’ which leads to learning. However, a classical view of orchestration would fail to recognise the extent to which effective teaching and learning make use of serendipity and improvisation – characteristics more often associated with jazz. This paper uses the characteristics of various musical genres to characterise teaching approaches observed in the authors’ work in two research projects investigating the use of ICT in mathematics classrooms. In particular the authors demonstrate how jazz and other musical analogies can be useful when describing some of the more effective classrooms in which serendipitous events were exploited and performances were improvised by pupils as well as teachers. They discuss the ways in which teachers were able to use ICT to establish conditions under which more jazz‐like performances were likely to occur, offering opportunities for more creative, improvised teaching and learning. They also examine lessons that can be learned by examining differences between musical and pedagogical settings.

Using information and communications technology to support interactive teaching and learning on a secondary mathematics initial teacher training course

Abstract An open and distance learning version of the full-time mathematics Postgraduate Certificate of Education (PGCE) course has been developed and trialled at the University of Wales Swansea. This was a part of a larger collaborative project, ‘HATT, 2000’ between the constituent colleges of the University of Wales which aimed to use the affordances of information and communications technology to enhance PGCE programmes and to widen access to teacher training in Wales. The project made use of conferencing email, web-based bulletin boards and streaming video to provide an alternative to some of the usual college-based elements of the course. This article discusses the pedagogical principles underpinning the design of the PGCE mathematics course, and focuses on the changes in the learning discourse arising from the affordances of the technology.