EDRS705 – Assignment 2 Preliminary Proposal Introduction Since 2010, my professional role has been Diocesan Consultant: Primary Mathematics within Catholic Education – Diocese of Rockhampton. This role has centred on the provision of professional development opportunities for teachers of primary mathematics across 31 Catholic primary schools from Mackay in the north, Bundaberg in the south, Rockhampton in the centre of the diocese and Longreach in the west. The role of Diocesan Consultant: Primary Mathematics has given me a privileged insight into diocesan teachers’ mathematical practices as they try to implement the new Australian Curriculum: Mathematics. In particular, I am concerned that my anecdotal evidence would suggest that teachers experience difficulty when using students’ own mathematical thinking to promote mathematical understanding and reasoning. Moreover I am concerned that this might not be isolated to my diocese, but may be related to the pressure that teachers in Australia are facing as a result of international pressure for change in the teaching of mathematics. Evidence from 2009 and 2014 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) data suggests that there is a widening mathematics achievement gap between children from high and low socio-economic status home backgrounds (Askew, 2011). In general, the mathematics …show more content…
This monitoring of Australian student achievement adds to the complexity of competitive pressures upon teachers of mathematics. Teachers are required to produce students who not only possess a conceptual understanding of the mathematical content, and display procedural mathematical fluency, but also who show adaptive reasoning and problem solving skills (Sullivan,