Best Teaching Practices in Australian Primary Education: Mathematics

This report discusses the best teaching practices in Australian primary schools for developing mathematical concepts among students. It focuses on guidelines provided by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership Ltd. and reviews three learning videos to identify best practices for improving students' understanding of mathematics.

Running Head: AUSTRALIAN PRIMARY EDUCATION: MATHEMATICS
Australian Primary Education: Mathematics
Name of the university
Name of the student
Author note

1AUSTRALIAN PRIMARY EDUCATION: MATHEMATICS
Executive summary
This report has discussed best teaching practices in Australian primary schools regarding
development of mathematical concepts among students. This study has particularly
concentrated on guidelines given by Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership
Ltd. which are linked to Australian Curriculum of teaching and learning programmes. In this
due course, best teaching practices have been addressed and the goal of various teaching
approaches to serve varied students’ capability have been elaborated. In this due course, three
learning videos have been reviewed with the motive of identifying best practices for
improving students’ concept of mathematics across primary schools of Australia.

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Table of Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................3
Part A.............................................................................................................................3
Teaching concepts and practices for teaching mathematics......................................3
Part B..............................................................................................................................6
Strategies of teaching: palindromic numbers.............................................................6
Conclusion......................................................................................................................9
References....................................................................................................................11

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Introduction
This report intends to prepare a guideline for future teachers regarding learning and
development of children in a schooling situation. This study will specifically focus on
guidelines given by Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership Ltd. which are
linked to Australian Curriculum of teaching and learning programmes. A review of a video
based on teachers’ grievances of Amaroo School, will be elaborated where children’s
experiences of learning numeracy and the process of practice will be revealed. The later part
of the report will highlight how upper primary school children are being taught Palindromic
numbers in Pleasant Street Primary School. Besides, an interview of the principal of Humpty
Doo primary school will also be considered in this course to describe and analyse procedures
of numeric tables. Teaching concepts will be evaluated and the best practices will be
emphasized to provide ideal guidance for improving teaching practices. Consequently, it will
contribute towards students’ learning as well.
Part A
Teaching concepts and practices for teaching mathematics
Traditionally, students are evaluated through several assessments maintaining a
periodic gap. The assessments are based on particular concept of subjects which are included
to the curriculum. Students are required to perform as per their levels of capability. This is
termed as summative assessment through which the teacher develops a concept regarding
students’ competence. However, formative assessment are a part of learning itself. According
to Ali, Shah and Gujjar (2014), it does not involve grades and promotes better learning
opportunity by sharing knowledge and strength with each other. Further, as stated in Burns,
Pierson and Reddy (2014), the procedure of assessment is not only applicable among

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students, but also teachers who are working together can help each other sharing their styles
and methods to contribute best for the student development.
Students are required to listen, understand and perform following the instructed way.
However, it must be remembered that not all the students come to school with same
capability. There are some students who can learn something fast yet cannot hold that in their
memory for long. On the contrary, some children take little time to understand but have to
strong memory to remember that and perform well consistently. In both the cases, the style of
practice and guidance matters a lot. Every student carries different learning psychology and
teachers are assigned with the task of not only make them learn but also to solve problems
and make them remember lessons in the long run. In this due course, formative assessment
can be the best practice in terms of their gradual mental as well as academic growth.
According to the (Aitsl.edu.au 2019), formative assessment has become the most
contemporary evaluation process to implement teaching responsibility. Amaroo is a
Government School with 1600 students in Metropolitan area of Canberra. The video has
recorded interview of a teacher and her associate. Moreover, a detail procedure of formative
assessment has been demonstrated within a classroom scenario where children under the age
of 4 years are learning single digit addition. Two of the teachers followed the procedures
maintaining three simple steps, assessment, feedback and providing reports. In order to check
their efficiency or understanding in different learning areas the teacher has been using
random method. In this process, students are selected randomly to answer and through this
process teachers gain information on students’ understanding. Teachers uses students’
feedback, whether it is written or verbal, as the base of evaluation and boost up improvement
working on the weak learning areas. At intervals, following the Fauth et al. (2014), teachers
change curriculum or the way of teaching depending on the students’ capability. Formative
assessment is strictly not about learning the lessons or the style of explain; it is about based

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on each student response or performance teachers have to support them accordingly. Through
this process, a student’s power of learning and observing lessons are revealed and these
information are crucial for future development as weakness are being recognised easily.
Teachers can receive better results in terms of proficiency if in the beginning of the
lesson, students are informed of clear learning outcomes and intentions. Students are asked to
inform about their understanding if they have achieved the formerly discussed desired
outcomes based on their learning nature. Some students learn independently and others need
help in some particular areas. Through these small aspects students are evaluated and
gradually works for improving those areas. Practicing this methods regularly transformed it
into practice. As a result children develop a habit of addressing their own incompetency and
feel free to ask for help from teacher instead of hiding it. This is a great way of giving and
receiving immediate feedback unlike summative mode of assessment.
Proficient teachers use creative methods to make their parents’ informed about their
children’s progress. They use stickers of different colours in notebook to update them
whether they are able to learn lessons or they will need more time to do the same. According
to Veldhuis and van den Heuvel-Panhuizen (2014), these evaluation process not only
increases student engagement towards daily lessons but also leadership abilities develop
among them to identify their mistakes, incapability or areas of improvement.
Apart from students’ development teachers concentrate on developing their
knowledge and skill as well by discussing each other’s’ method of organising formative
assessment. Being in association is great for learning from each other’s’ strength and
weaknesses. Identification of weakness can lead towards probable opportunities and
recognise possible damages to the entire system. Sharing works and making lesson plan in

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association with someone experienced develops various competencies regarding teaching
practices and help to observe students psychology more precisely.
Part B
Strategies of teaching: palindromic numbers
According to AITSL regulation, as displayed in (Youtube.com, 2019), at proficient
stage teachers seeks for intense question answer session to comprehend students’ perspective
or understanding of the lesson. Teachers generally first explain the concept and formula to
identify palindromic numbers and then ask students to work on it. Besides, through question
and answer session teachers try to identify incompetence and resolve confusions. The central
problem which occurs on a regular basis is to serve ‘diverse range of abilities’ within a
classroom situation. Therefore, before asking questions teachers must determine which
questioning techniques are going to be helpful to generate desired outcome from the diverse
range of capabilities within a classroom situation. Questioning serves so many purposes
including to engage students actively with the curriculum, to develop their skills of critical
thinking capabilities, to check if they can remember previous lessons and how far they are
able to answer the ongoing lessons in practice.
Instructions in a classroom becomes more impactful with questioning technique.
Through questioning students can recall formerly read or heard information, realize
implementation of the concept and able to evaluate themselves through such practices. As per
the study of Hudson, Henderson and Hudson (2015), critical thinking ability is when students
dig deep into the concept and try to find out inner meaning. Instead of asking which are the
palindromic numbers teachers can ask to identify palindromic numbers from a set of
numerical expressions. It will not only help them to understand the concept but also the

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examples will lead them towards better perception. Based on the ability of students response
feedback report is made for concentrating on various learning areas of development.
While talking about best practices to teach palindromic numbers the concept is
explained first with the help of words. After that numeric idea has been introduced. At the
end of the process students are expected to identify palindromic digits amidst from other
numeric expressions. Besides, they are required to learn the processes to formulate
palindromic numbers out of non-palindromic numbers. Another concept which can be spotted
during the session that towards the end of the class students are instructed to share their
individual understanding to each other. It would help to resolve confusion and revise the
lessons just after the lecture. Although, this must be done under teacher’s supervision to
avoid development of wrong conceptions among students regarding the newly learnt lessons.
Following the guidelines of Lim and Oakley (2013), apart from the verbal explanation
teacher uses soft materials as well to explain the chapter too.
The next part is conducting a question and answer session. As mentioned before, such
sessions are helpful enough in terms of identifying students’ competence to learn a specific
concept only if it can be planned in an appropriate way. Following steps must be followed to
conduct a successful session with students learning any mathematical lesson.
 Questions must be planned and written down as a part of lesson plan which must be
aligned with the age and curriculum of students. Simultaneously, it must address the
varied ability of learners.
 Students’ responses must be anticipated continuously against wrong or partially
correct concepts.
 Both the soft and hard study materials will be provided in order to practice at home
and among classmates playing short question techniques with them.

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Although, as described in Shahrill (2013), questioning technique is effective in terms
of gaining knowledge about students’ abilities, still there are other tools and techniques as
well to treat and ensure development of a learning environment. Not only different abilities
but also varied cultural abilities are present within a classroom. Learning styles can be
changed in terms of addressing the different cultural needs. As described in D'Mello et al.
(2015), Multimodal practices and use of colourful materials have always been effective for
teaching primary class students. As mentioned before in the previous section, regular
assessment and formative assessment programmes will be implemented continually to
check progress and effectiveness of the learning styles. Oral tests would be useful too, to
recognise students’ ability of public speaking and comprehend the gather information.
Students come with different disabilities like fail to comprehend the meaning, some of
them cannot calculate within the given time or few forget the concept two days after the
class. In order to treat all of these disabilities regular practice class can be the most helpful.
As principal of Humpty Doo school as stated in an interview available on following link
(Youtube.com, 2019), conducting sessions of group discussion help the students to practice
lessons using mental computation techniques and learn from each other’s’ strengths. It
develops a sense of competition among students as well. Consequently, advanced students
motivate themselves to study provided materials and go beyond the concept to apply in
regular practices.
Above mentioned two strategies are parts of teaching best practices to generate
desired outcome within a learning and development situation. Further some of the best
practices of teaching are as follows.
 Communicating with students regarding lesson and assessment procedure for a
considerable amount of time is necessary even before starting the lesson itself.

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 For understanding and practicing classroom activities and assignments, students must
be provided with relevant materials.
 While implementing such practices time is the biggest challenge to manage. In that
case, teachers’ capability to build professional lesson plan where diverse abilities of
students are addressed.
 Another aspect, which must be taught to students simultaneously with lessons is how
to organize materials as they are primary students.
 Along with lessons, consistently encouraging students to maintain the engagement
with lessons is necessary to generate desired learning outcome as it lead towards
positive feedback.
 Formative assessment process is helpful not only gain knowledge about students’
competence, it helps students as well to develop self-assessment capabilities to keep a
track of their gradual progress.
 Most importantly, a trustworthy mutual relationship is necessary to establish so that
student feel comfortable to come up with their problems, confusions and be honest.
 In case of identification of negative behaviour among students regarding their
tendency to create nuisance are the ones who deny to learn or commit those mistakes
out of immaturity. For better engagement with the learning situation, separate
classroom can be arranged for them for counselling purpose and slowly monitor their
growth.
Conclusion
Therefore, from the above discussion it has been observed that the objective of
formative assessment is to supervise students’ progress to achieve desired learning outcome.
It helps teachers to identify their missing links to improve teaching approaches too. Hence,
main two goals are to make students realize their strengths and weaknesses in the path of

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accomplishing target of the assigned lesson assignments. Secondly, teachers can gain
knowledge of students’ varied abilities and develop strategies accordingly. To make the
students understand the concept and to gain immediate feedback from the class, a set of
appropriate questionnaire and lesson plan is necessary as far as the perception from AITSL
guidelines has been observed.

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References
Aitsl.edu.au 2019. Explicit numeracy experiences. [online] Aitsl.edu.au. Available at:
https://www.aitsl.edu.au/tools-resources/resource/explicit-numeracy-experiences-illustration-
of-practice [Accessed 4 Jan. 2019].
Ali, I., Shah, S.M.H. and Gujjar, A.A., 2014. Continuous Classroom Assessment at Primary
Level. Journal of Educational Technology, 11(1), pp.15-21.
Burns, M., Pierson, E. and Reddy, S., 2014. Working Together: How Teachers Teach and
Students Learn in Collaborative Learning Environments. International Journal of
Instruction, 7(1), pp.17-32.
D'Mello, S.K., Olney, A.M., Blanchard, N., Samei, B., Sun, X., Ward, B. and Kelly, S., 2015,
November. Multimodal capture of teacher-student interactions for automated dialogic
analysis in live classrooms. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM on international conference on
multimodal interaction (pp. 557-566). ACM.
Fauth, B., Decristan, J., Rieser, S., Klieme, E. and Büttner, G., 2014. Student ratings of
teaching quality in primary school: Dimensions and prediction of student outcomes. Learning
and Instruction, 29, pp.1-9.
Hudson, B., Henderson, S. and Hudson, A., 2015. Developing mathematical thinking in the
primary classroom: liberating students and teachers as learners of mathematics. Journal of
Curriculum Studies, 47(3), pp.374-398.
Lim, C.P. and Oakley, G., 2013. Information and communication technologies (ICT) in
primary education. In Creating holistic technology-enhanced learning experiences(pp. 1-18).
SensePublishers, Rotterdam.

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Shahrill, M., 2013. Review of effective teacher questioning in mathematics
classrooms. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 3(17), pp.224-231.
Veldhuis, M. and van den Heuvel-Panhuizen, M., 2014. Exploring the feasibility and
effectiveness of assessment techniques to improve student learning in primary mathematics
education. In Proceedings of the 38th Conference of the International Group for the
Psychology of Mathematics Education and the 36th Conference of the North American
Chapter of the Psychology of Mathematics Education (Vol. 5, pp. 329-336). PME.
Youtube.com 2019. Palindromic numbers. [online] YouTube. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yY2ASiJlPg [Accessed 4 Jan. 2019].
Youtube.com 2019. Using mental computation strategies. [online] YouTube. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dxfhxBQlnk&t=2s [Accessed 4 Jan. 2019].