Reflecting on my Teaching

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 After consulting research about what could be considered 'best practice' in teaching mathematics, I need to compare my findings with my current practice.

After looking at my planning/ class site, student blogs and chatting to my students, there are a few things I can see I have strengths in and some that I need to work on.

PROS

Curriculum knowledge

This has always been one of my strengths. I was real nerd at university and have attended a fair bit of PD over the years to ensure I have a good understanding of what is expected at each level of the curriculum. As such, I can offer students content that is appropriate for their level of learning. A lot of the content I have historically made covers level 4 achievement objectives - appropriate for year 7 and 8. Hill, Rowan and Ball (2005) identify that teachers knowledge directly affects their students achievement. It has been a common theme I have seen across literature, but there is a lot more to teaching maths.

Basic Facts

I have been able to introduce lots of basic fact learning tasks to my class. We have times table quizzes/ games and I include things I want my students to memorise frequently in my tasks - e.g. lots of converting between 0.25, 25% and 1/4 as I want them to automatically recall this. I found lots of research, such as this article, highlighting the need to teach basic facts.


Work Ons

Differentiation

This is something I once had a strength in. I remember when I first started teaching, I had a few classes whose span was a lot smaller - say year 5 to 8 and I was able to prepare different content/ materials/ experiences for my learners well. This year my span is five levels of the curriculum - my student range from year 2 to 9. It's been a challenge to say the least! While I've set content at all of these levels, it has been near impossible to meet with each group of kids daily and to keep up with experiences that best suit their needs. I had five groups at each level of the curriculum, but within those groups the learners had quite different strengths. I then tried to move to flexible grouping - they would all move to different groups if they found something too difficult/easy. This made it a lot better, but there was always at least one set of students missing out, unfortunately this was usually my higher learners.

Teaching Junior Maths

I haven't had a student as low as year two since I was a first year BT, but the span of my students achievement levels means I have a group who are still at a junior school level. I've always taught older students, so I have gaps in my understanding of the teaching processes required for students at this level. While I can identify their next steps/ knowledge and strategies they need, the experiences and materials are different. 

Since becoming a mum to a number loving toddler, and from spending time in junior classes, I can see how children's love of maths can begin. I love the way they take joy in numbers and experimenting. There must be more ways to capture this in a senior classroom. This is something I'm going to focus on in my teaching.




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