Editorial.
Attard, Catherine
Welcome to 2015 and a new issue of Australian Primary Mathematics
Classroom. By the time you receive your copy of this issue you would
have settled in with your new class and you will have already
established many routines and practices for the year. Now is also a
great time to be thinking about participating in professional
development, whether it is formal, casual, in school or elsewhere.
Ongoing professional development in mathematics is becoming
increasingly important, particularly with the recent release of the
Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group (TEMAG) (2014) report,
Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers, included a recommendation that
pre-service primary teachers graduate with a subject specialisation
prioritising science, mathematics, or a language (Recommendation 18). In
the government's response (Australian Government: Department of
Education and Training, 2015), they agree "greater emphasis must be
given to core subjects of literacy and numeracy" and will be
instructing AITSL to "require universities to make sure that every
new primary teacher graduates with a subject specialisation" (p.8).
While this is very welcome news, we need to keep in mind that we have a
substantial existing teaching workforce, many of whom should consider
becoming subject specialists. It is now time for providers of
professional development, including tertiary institutions, to provide
more opportunities for all teachers, regardless of experience, to
improve their knowledge and skills in mathematics teaching and learning,
and re-engage with the subject.
Another way of engaging with mathematics based professional
development is to try out some of the excellent ideas that appear in
this issue of APMC. As usual, there is a great range of high quality,
research based articles that cover a range of curriculum areas. This
issue begins with a paper from Hilton, Hilton, Dole and Goos, explaining
how the use of photographic images can be used to support the conceptual
development of proportional thinking. This is followed by Reid and
Carmichael's paper that describes how some Year 6 children have
developed their statistical reasoning by studying Asian countries.
Ramful and Ho provide us with insight into quantitative reasoning,
describing how it is used in relation to mathematical problem solving,
while Day and Hurrell provide a range of examples that illustrate the
benefits of using arrays to promote the understanding of mental
strategies for multiplication. More teaching and learning ideas are
provided by Hourigan and Leavy, who look at the identification and
classification of 2-dimensional shapes. Findings from a teaching
experiment that involved a Year 3 unit of work on decimals are provided
in a paper by Wright and Tjorpatzis, and in the final paper, Muir, Bragg
and Livy discuss the concept of functional thinking as a foundational
idea associated with algebraic thinking.
I am sure you will find plenty to spark your interest in this issue
and once again, I would encourage you to write in with any ideas,
reflections or feedback.
Catherine Attard
University of "Western Sydney
<c.attard@uws.edu.au>
