Keira's reflection

Educator story

Keira Marlow
Northfield Primary School
Alberton Cluster

Last year I decided to look closely at the structure of our mathematics learning and made changes to the pedagogical approach in order to focus on increasing the level of ‘Mathematical Resilience’ in our learners, in particular when problem solving.

I decided that I would make the students explicitly aware of the attributes of a resilient learner.

At the very beginning, students would participate in a problem solving task and I would observe their attitudes towards the task, the strategies that they used and the quality of their responses. Often students would appear confused about how to begin, unsure of what was required of them and unaware of what they could use around them to help assist their working out. They would often respond quickly when faced with a problem by saying “I don’t know how to do it.”..

See Keira's Unit of Learning Mathematical Problem Solving to find out more about her teaching approach.