Formulating a Hypothesis

This week in our Kāhui Ako meeting, we discussed formulation of hypotheses. I have chosen to summarise my hunches, as well as research that has supported these hunches and feedback from my Kāhui Ako colleagues. I believe that my hunches are still too broad and more work needs to be done to narrow down my focus to something which is going to be measurable. 

DMIC Maths Professional Development

Today in maths professional development with Don, we have been thinking about the importance of giving all the children status in the classroom. It is really important that we recognise the different talents that different children bring to the class and that we acknowledge that every child has value to bring to a lesson.

Often, there are the same children who will always be the first to answer and the other children know this. There are ways we can avoid having the same children answering all the time:

- No hands up

- TPS (Think-pair-share)

- If someone asks for help, you can’t say no.

- Give children control by giving them the chance to ask someone else for help, or they can say “Can you come back to me soon?” - children have knowledge that the teacher will come back to them.

- Get a child to repeat another child's response instead of having to come up with something new.

By doing this, all children are made to have responsibility for their learning and there is an expectation that all children have value to add to the lesson.

Language Acquisition in maths

What have I done in my Inquiry this term?

- Targeted students who tend to be quiet in group learning.

- GLOSS for these students showed limited progress in number.

- For these students, I assessed their use/ improvement in maths (through maths-whizz): 4.7, 4.3, 3.2, 2.2, 2.2, 2.0, 1.0, 0.4 progressions per week.

- I was concerned about those who had a progress of 2.2 progressions and below, particularly with the amount of time these students were spending on maths-whizz.

This suggests that those learners (2.2 and below for maths-whizz) required small group support, rather than independent work when not with the teacher. Therefore, from this target group, there are two clear groups which I can be meeting with every second day on top of DMIC problem solving. I will also work to ensure these learners are with each other in group problem solving.

Maths PD - Term 3

This week, we had some great maths PD with Jo Knox. She left us with some great ideas for teaching our learners from Year 5 through to Year 8. One idea she shared with us stuck with me and I trialled it with my class today. Below, I have explained the task:

Using arm motions, we represented a range of different fractions: 1 whole, 1/2, 1/4, and 1/8. Here are some picture representations I have created to demonstrate these different arm motions:

The students were extremely quick at picking up these 4 arm motions, and it did not take long for them to gain confidence in understanding relationships between them. After the students were able to quickly form the arm motions, they were told to get into groups of 3 or 4. I then called out fractions which they had to create using these four arm motions. This was a great way to see which students could understand these fractions and the connections between each other. This was a great way for the students to develop their understanding that half of a quarter was 1 eighth. This really showed when the students created 1 and 3/8, with only three students. It was really positive to see that many of the groups managed to solve the problem by creating 1 whole, 1/4, and 1/8. They could also confidently explain that 1//4 was the same as 2/8 by using these representations of fractions.

Later in the day, while teaching a maths group, I asked students what 1/4 of 1000 was. The students accurately responded with '250.' I followed this by asking the same students what 1/8 of 1000 was. Students were confused, until I linked them back to this above task. As soon as they made the connection back to 1/8 being half of 1/4, the students could accurately give me the answer, '125.' After seeing how engaged students were in this task, and how much they took away from this experience, I am interested in finding more of these types of interactive, engaging maths tasks. 

NOTE: This is an activity I learned through a maths PD session. It is not an activity created/designed by me.