Syllabus In The Australian Curriculum

Introduction

Recorded lessons by Mary Psaila and Kelly Rhinehart are analysed to understand specific concepts taught and aspects of best practice used in a classroom environment.

Concepts Taught https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yY2ASiJlPg In this lesson, the teacher focused on creating an atmosphere of inquiry with the intent to get students interested in exploring patterns and properties of numbers, specifically palindromic numbers. This is representative of ACMNA122 and ACMNA133 in the year 6 syllabus of the Australian Curriculum, describing the identification and representations of number properties, and identification of number and geometric patterns (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority [ACARA], n.d.). The lesson content

Throughout the entire lesson, the teacher was continuously encouraging the students to be curious and explore the different properties of palindromic numbers through tests and experimentation. The teacher also assisted in developing students’ expression of their strategies through encouraging them to verbally explain their strategies and logical processes, as well as asking questions that use what they know to explore other possible numerical

First of all, both teachers started with a method of engagement to the lesson content where Psaila produced an animated and interesting introduction to the topic, adjusting her tone of voice and utilising suspenseful pauses to promote interest in the new content, while Rhinehart employed a mathematical ‘tune in’ game to shift her students’ mindset to thinking in numbers. These strategies are representative of ‘task debriefing’ as an effective teaching strategy for embedding mathematical ideas into lessons (Hurst, 2007, p. 448). Hurst (2007) also discusses that students with a greater involvement and personal interest into a context of mathematics will display greater understanding of the concepts (p. 447). The next stage observed is the explicit teaching stage where the teacher provided the lesson content (if new) and specific instruction on the lesson’s task. Rhinehart even directly told her students to concentrate more on how to explain the process of solving a question rather than just producing an answer (AITSL, n.d. b). Lastly, both lessons finished with a reflection stage where the learned content was applied to other contexts. Psaila used the maths300 program to demonstrate applications of number identities while Rhinehart questioned and discussed the real life applications of mental computations. Reys (2016) argues that this form of learning and