News

And about the same time Kasie wrote:

In the June eNews we showed some evaluations of the first two days of the six day program Working Like A Mathematician being presented for the Canberra Goulburn Diocese of the Catholic Education Office. At the end of Days 3 & 4 the teachers were asked to finish three sentences. Only primary teachers are involved in the course this year (the third year we have presented it) and the two days involved sharing classroom trials since the May meeting and investigating ways of improving the teaching of fractions, decimals and percent.

Here are some of their responses.

Gina, Madonna and Fiona are the local curriculum officers who use school visits and a broad range of other support to keep the pot boiling between our teacher sessions. They, along with the decision-makers in the diocese who have backed them all the way, are to be complimented and congratulated for the well planned and executed changes they are encouraging across their extensive diocese.

If your school, network, cluster, region, district or system is keen to encourage curriculum shift like this, please discuss our 6 Day primary program which focuses on number, or our 6 Day secondary program which focuses on algebra.

Deborah Heath, St. Joseph's, Grenfell, NSW, is one of the teachers in the Canberra Working Like A Mathematician course. She was obviously fired up by her experience and went straight back to school to organise a parent evening.

Thanks to Toni Pfeiffer, Good Shepherd, Amaroo, NSW, who is another of the enthusiatic teachers in the Canberra CEO course, we have three more Investigation Guides to share with you. Toni has provided two guides for Task 13, The Frog Pond, and one for Task 19, Cookie Count. See Link List below.

An Investigation Guide is designed to extend the work on a task card. It gathers the learning developed through the task card and then asks questions to encourage digging deeper. An IG is used in two ways:

1. After the children have worked through the task card.
   They have a discussion with the teacher about what they have done. Celebration and questioning leads to something like, "Would you like to do more on this problem?" If the answer is yes, the teacher provides the IG and the children keep working and recording in their journal. They would normally still have the task with them so they can continue to use the equipment in it.
2. The teacher has converted the task to a whole class investigation.
   After setting up the investigation through class involvement of some sort and after children have begun their exploration an IG can be introduced to support them to dig deeper. At relevant points in the lesson(s) the teacher will facilitate class or small group discussion based on what develops from the children's efforts.