Learning and Teaching 

Professional Learning at St Joseph's

Dear Parents,

Today, staff engaged in Professional Development in Mathematics facilitated by MACS, Southern Region staff.  Our focus for today was:

• to reflect on our current typical lesson structure for mathematics
• consider the role of the teacher and the role of the student in a maths lesson
• identify the key elements of structuring lessons
• explore two approaches that underpin the different lesson structure models
• define feedback and explore why feedback is an important research based pedagogical practice 
• explore research based feedback models 
• consider the role of feedback in assessment, as and for learning 
• unpack the forms of effective feedback
• share a range of strategies for providing feedback.

We investigated how students need to  experience a range of lesson structures, task types and pedagogies in any sequence of learning. The need for a variety of teaching strategies and lesson structures is reinforced by research that recommends:

A single teaching strategy will not work for all mathematics problems .... teaching

complex mathematics skills might require different instructional strategies than

those used to teach basic mathematics skills.... teachers need a diverse set of tools

to teach the breadth of their mathematics curriculum and to help students advance

from the most rudimentary to the most complex mathematics problems” (OECD, 2016, p.15).

Kind regards

Megan Barber

mbarber@sjsorrento.catholic.edu.au