Reconnaissance - student inquiry foci (Part 3)

The Challenge: How do we accelerate achievement in maths when teachers are tasked with teaching a classroom of students with a range of maths abilities and with various gaps in maths knowledge?

Possible inquiry focus in terms of student learning: Working collaboratively to accelerate achievement in maths for all Year 3 to 4 children.

Reason why I judge this to be the most important and catalytic issue of learning for this group of learners this year:

We can see from the Manaiakalani data (in my last blog post) that the achievement levels in maths are right down compared to the national norm. We need to be accelerating the learning of our children so their maths achievement gets closer to this norm.

In Manaiakalani, a lot of work has been done to create a 'common language' for teaching of writing and reading across the cluster, however this has not yet been done for Maths.

As a school, we have used a number of maths pedagogical strategies however have not yet reached a strategy which supports ALL of our students at their range of different maths levels. I am going to be working alongside two other Kāhui ako teachers from my school to address this challenge of student learning as well as the challenge of teaching.

Our initial plan: We are looking at identifying a group of children from across Year 3 and 4 who show evidence of being strong mathematicians. Once a week, for about 45 minutes, I will work with this group of students to extend them mathematically (the structure of these lessons is yet to be determined however initial thoughts are that these will be project-based and possibly follow a DMIC lesson structure). When these students go back to their own classrooms, Clarelle Carruthers is looking at ways she can utilise the learning of these children back in her own maths classroom to support the maths learning in her class as a whole. While Clarelle and I are working with the Year 3s and 4s in this way, Danni Stone (Across school teacher) is looking at spending time extending children in Year 6 to 8 mathematically. Clarelle and I will work collaboratively with Danni so pedagogically, we are using similar strategies and a structure which can then be replicated by other teachers if it is to be successful in accelerating achievement.