As promised my newsletter item this week is all about Working Mathematically.  I bet you have been on tenterhooks this last fortnight waiting.

Last year we commenced our journey into improving our Mathematics pedagogy (how we teach Maths) by unpacking “What is Numeracy?” and “What is Working Mathematically?” as these two underpin good pedagogy.  Let’s start with numeracy.

In the Australian Curriculum, students become numerate as they develop the knowledge and skills to use mathematics confidently across other learning areas at school and in their lives more broadly. Numeracy encompasses the knowledge, skills, behaviours and dispositions that students need to use mathematics in a wide range of situations. It involves students recognising and understanding the role of mathematics in the world and having the dispositions and capacities to use mathematical knowledge and skills purposefully.

When teachers identify numeracy demands across the curriculum, students have opportunities to transfer their mathematical knowledge and skills to contexts outside the mathematics classroom. These opportunities help students recognise the interconnected nature of mathematical knowledge, other learning areas and the wider world, and encourage them to use their mathematical skills broadly.

https://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/general-capabilities/numeracy/

As you will appreciate from the above definition, teaching students to be numerate is critical as it is a life skill.  Students have to learn to utilise their mathematical knowledge across the curriculum and recognise how it impacts on their daily lives and how to be efficient operators.

In the NSW curriculum Working Mathematically has 5 components:  Communicating, Understanding, Reasoning, Fluency and Problem Solving. When talking to my Year 4 students recently they thought that Working Mathematically was just problem solving.  It very definitely is not.  Working Mathematically is incorporated into the design of our lessons and influences very heavily the way in which we teach.  Let me provide a really simple example.  Recently, Year 4 was completing a unit of work on 2 Dimensional and 3 Dimensional shapes and objects.  They have to be able to communicate mathematically.  So, there is all this mathematical language requiring fluency.  If they cannot talk the maths language then how can I expect that they will understand what I am saying. For example:  What are the dimensions? Answer:  length, width and height (or depth).  What is the length of an object or shape and what is its width? Answer : length is always its longest side.  Another really obvious language or communicating problem they have in this area, is the naming protocols for shapes.  They will say that an irregular septagon is an arrow or they call a rhombus or a kite a diamond.  In order to understand and describe the properties of shapes they need to name and refer to them correctly.  I hope I haven’t lost you! To be good, efficient mathematicians the children need to be able to speak the language correctly and they need to possess different skills and strategies in order to problem solve.  They need to be fluent, this doesn’t mean they need to be quick, it simply means that in working towards a solution they are efficient, and have automaticity. Reasoning is perhaps the hardest component as it requires the student to use logic ( LOL I know many adults that I question their logic.. Or perhaps they question mine!)  When reasoning I expect students to infer and make generalisations. For example, In Year 4 we are currently exploring patterns. This week we were attempting to establish a rule using a guess and check strategy.  We established that it couldn’t be a multiple of 5 because the numbers in the pattern would be even, odd, even, odd and the pattern we were looking at had only even numbers.   Working Mathematically is basically the “how” of their Maths operating. 

I could go on forever (I usually do). If you have any questions please contact me kim.hogan@mn.catholic.edu.au

God Bless

Kim Hogan

Assistant Principal