Literacy and Numeracy strategies on placement

I recently completed my first placement as a Math teacher in a secondary high school in Melbourne. I have previously worked primarily with adults, at summer programs or with highly engaged students. I feel like I gained a valuable sense of the range of students abilities and teaching strategies I will need to be proactively engage with once I start teaching.

Numeracy

Numeracy obviously has a huge role to play in the maths class and in the role maths teacher’s play in building student’s numeracy skills. It became apparent to me while observing year 7, 8 and 11 classes the amount of factorisation and common factors appear as prerequisites to learning new skills. As one of the older maths teachers lamented, the students, for varying reasons, didn’t have multiplication tables embedded in their heads.

In order to work with students who were still developing those skills I saw a number of strategies employed in the classroom. Allowing some students to use calculators to test multiples on their calculator, having students write down multiples in their workbooks to refer back to (much like vocabulary lists for literacy comprehension) and providing differentiated workbooks and textbook questions from developing to consolidating to extending.

Literacy

It can be pretty easy to put literacy to the side when trying to build student’s numeracy skills. I noticed a tendency to give worded questions to the students who were extending their knowledge. On the one hand, I can see how adding words to a problem is logically only more complex than a completely abstract problem. On the other hand, I wonder if the abstract nature of the mathematics left students more confused than real world worded questions may have.

In one class the students’ workbooks asked them to complete the meta-cognitive task of writing a letter explaining how to simplify fractions. A great example of assessing students ability to transfer skills and of their literacy skills in letter composition and instructional writing.

I was able to identify a student who had difficulty with reading and comprehending the complex nature of this question. Though once I explained the problem orally, the student was very adept at answering the question. This was a good demonstration of the principle that a student’s literacy development is non-linear. I was happy to find that my placement school was using smart pens as an aide to read text for students, empowering them to understand written text without need for teacher intervention.