There are lots of different ways to use these resources. We encourage you to find one that you are comfortable with, and which works in your own school context.

For example, you could start by using one or more of the classroom tasks with a particular class, matching it to their curriculum. These tasks come with detailed guidance which exemplifies how to bring attention to language.

Alternatively, you might choose to focus on practising one or two of the talk moves, noting what you try and how the learners respond. Over time this can help you develop and embed a technique into your regular practice.

It is often helpful to set yourself a goal. You might plan to use one of the classroom tasks with a different group each half-term, or challenge yourself to build opportunities for active listening into your planning for one group (from any year group) over the course of a term. Where it is possible, we also recommend working with an interested colleague, perhaps using the noticing framework sheet to structure observations and promote supportive conversation. Setting goals and working with others can help you deal with challenges and celebrate what is working well.

The Discipline of Noticing

These professional development materials are developed using the principles underlying the Discipline of Noticing (Mason, 2002). The materials are designed to help you prepare for communication-responsive teaching by thinking about what you want to focus on and be sensitive to in your own classroom. As a teacher, you are the person who knows your students best as well as yourself. Paying closer attention to specific aspects of your mathematics teaching and your students' learning, in relation to both the mathematical and the linguistic demands, can help to make connections, inform decisions and to act differently.

This approach is most effective if it is conscious and systematic. Most teachers find it useful to keep notes, in whatever form is useful to them, about what they notice, what they are aware of, and how they responded to students both in their teaching and their planning.

Lessons are made up of hundreds of choices and moments where opportunities to act arise. Being more aware of these choices and opportunities, and a range of possible ways of responding to them, opens up more opportunities to respond to students in ways that support their learning of mathematics.

The materials in this program are designed to draw attention to the linguistic and communicative demands of key mathematical concepts or widely used classroom tasks. They are not designed to prescribe a particular choice or way of teaching, but instead are designed to offer different possibilities when teaching the topics we focus on so you can notice more opportunities to act or to act differently.

References

Mason, J. (2002). Researching your own practice: The discipline of noticing. Routledge.

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