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>> Professor Peter Sullivan >> The Australian Curriculum Mathematics
>> Professor Peter Sullivan >> I...I want to talk about the Australian
Curriculum Mathematics, and what it might look like in classrooms, but first let me
just mention what mathematics is, and... and what it is that we want to educate our children
for. >> Fundamentally mathematics is about a way
of seeing the world, it... it you know it's functional we... It helps us solve everyday
issues, Ah, it's social, it's a way of understanding the complexity of the world, um, you know
in Science, in Economics, in Psychology, and a whole lot of places.
>> You know the Australian Curriculum has two fundamental elements. The first one is
the content, now the content is about um, we can think of it being the nouns, and what
it is, it's lists of the type of mathematical development, that... that students will progress
through from year to year, and the teachers can then say, well this is the type of mathematics
that on balance most of the students should engage with at some stage in the year.
>> The truth matter is that... that those nouns are not very different from what existed
in South Australia and most other states already, and so that shouldn't make a big difference,
but one of the characteristics that the way the curriculum was written is it's written
very simply, and the intent is that teachers come to understand what the curriculum says,
and then make their own decisions about what the curriculum is intending to... to... for
them to do in their classroom. >> So they'll take that, and they'll let it
in act that classroom, that... that those ideas in their own ways, it's much more important
that teachers know what they're doing, than the teachers try to implement someone else's
lesson. >> The other aspect of the curriculum is what
we might think of as the verbs, the things that we do, now one way to think about it
is that we want the children to be, to think and be like a mathematician, now that means
doing things. >> Now there are some principals that are
going to guide the inactivment of this in classroom, one of them is that fundamentally
experience should proceed instruction, and so we want to give that... give students um,
tasks in which they can engage, after which there can be some instructional sharing of
ideas. >> The other thing is that students should
sometimes work on tasks they don't already know how to do, and... and this is important,
because if they're always working on things they know how to do, there not going to be
learning, because that leads on to what fundamentally is the most important element of the curriculum,
is that we want the children to know that they can learn mathematics, and if they know
they can learn mathematics, then the next year is not going to be terrifying for them,
the concept of doing um, senior, secondary mathematics is not going to be terrifying,
the concept of using mathematics in their world is not going to be terrifying, we want
them to know they can learn, and so that's what it's about.
>> There are four proficiencies fluency, understanding, problem solving, and reasoning, now the fluency
and understanding are very much of what teachers have always been doing, but the problem solving
and reasoning represent a change to what the curriculum has been, the working map mathematically
strand, didn't quite create the impression, that the problem solving and reasoning verbs
work with the nouns, so problem solving and reasoning are on the content, there not separate
from the content, they're part of the content. >> And so what we have to do is find ways
to support teachers, and engaging with problem solving, meaning, asking the students questions
that they don't know how to do, and reasoning meaning, the students planning a strategy,
implementing the strategy, communicating that strategy, and being able to convince someone
else that their strategy is the strategy that communicates the answers, and if we can somehow
find a way to integrate the content when it's called the nouns, with the prafictincey let's
call it the verbs, so we get sentences that are rich, that produce, ah, that create the
opportunities for students to learn mathematics in a way which is robust, which are sustainable,
which prepares them for a life in which they can implement aspects of mathematics, in all
aspects of their study, their professional life, their personal life, their work life,
and their social life.