Mary's+overview

Whitefriars School Update as of September 2009
During Term 3 all teachers have worked on the //Space and Geometric Reasoning Strand.//

At the end of Term 2 teachers were provided with planning tie in their Year level teams. Together with the support of Athina, our Catholic Edication Offfice Consultant, they planned a unit of work. All were asked to focus on one or two Characteristics of Effective Teaching in Maths as part of their work. The concept of journalling had been introduced to teachers prior to this and we have encouraged them to use this process themselves and to introduce it for their students to use also. In some groups teachers also chose to focus on three students as part of their unit.

In Staff meeting in Week 7 the work from the Unit was shared. Some of the presentations included: - the planning time as a team was very valuable - working with Athina's support helped provide direction and resources - having a whole school focus has enabled more professional discussions around people's teaching - focussing on the Characteristics of Effective Teaching has provided greater awareness of further possibilities in teachers' work eg deepening questioning, getting students to reflect on their learnings - focussing on the Space and Geometric Reasoning strand has given many teachers renewed confidence in an area of Maths that they may not normally be - greater use of Mathematical language has resulted from children being asked to explain more of how and what and why the are doing

//Some questions for our future directions:// The use of journalling: teachers have realised that they need to do more explicit teaching of this for children to do it effectively. If all do make good use of it overtime this strategy would hopefully be valuable across other curriculum areas. Gathering of data: how do we record what we gather in an effective way How do we keep the momentum from this unit of work going into the future How do we best engage parents in what we are teaching and how we are teaching