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Traditionally Australian primary school teachers have been viewed as generalists responsible for instruction across all content areas. Adopting self-determination theory as a lens, the aim of the study was to explore the extent to which generalist primary school teachers are interested in becoming subject matter specialists. Questionnaire data were collected from 104 early years primary school teachers. Findings suggest that two-thirds of these generalist teachers expressed an interest in specialising in either English, mathematics, and to a far lesser extent, science, such that they would be responsible for exclusively teaching this subject. Preferences for specialisation were based on teachers' self-perceived content and pedagogical expertise and/ or their enjoyment of teaching in this content area. By contrast, the one-third of teachers who would choose to remain generalists referred to the value in a variety of teaching experiences, teaching from a whole child perspective and content integration. Implications for educational policy are discussed.

Given what is known about the importance of productive struggle for supporting student learning of mathematics at all levels, the current study sought to examine teacher attitudes towards student struggle when students learn mathematics in remote learning settings compared with classroom settings. Eighty-two Australian early years primary teachers involved in a professional learning initiative focused on teaching mathematics through sequences of challenging tasks completed a questionnaire inviting them to compare the two settings. Drawing on a mixed-methods approach, we found that teachers were more positive about the value of student struggle in classroom-based settings compared with remote learning settings. Qualitative analysis of open-ended responses revealed four themes capturing why teachers viewed efforts to support productive struggle in a remote learning setting as potentially problematic: absence of a teacher-facilitated, synchronous, learning environment; parents' negative attitudes towards struggle when learning mathematics; lack of social connection and peer-to-peer collaboration; and difficulties accessing learning materials. Suggestions for mitigating some of these challenges in the future are put forward.

Despite teacher enjoyment of teaching being associated with a range of benefits for teachers and their students, little research exploring the characteristics of teachers who enjoy teaching mathematics exists. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten teachers who scored in the top third in terms of their enjoyment of teaching mathematics from a sample of 118 generalist, early-year primary school teachers. Thematic analysis of interview data revealed that negative-to-positive turning point experiences were commonplace amongst high-enjoyment primary teachers, but so too were reports of consistently positive feelings towards mathematics throughout their entire lives. While most articulated a passion for teaching mathematics, all teachers considered instances when students experienced 'light bulb' moments in their mathematical understanding that made a mathematics lesson enjoyable to teach. An important implication of our research is that one need not be a 'maths person' to come to love teaching mathematics. Rather, positive experiences in one's pre-service teacher education, or in-service teacher professional learning, have the potential to transform one's attitude towards teaching mathematics.

This article is based upon Peter Sullivan's (2021) structured inquiry approach to teaching mathematics, in which the authors take a deep dive into the technique of "Spotlighting" in the "Explore" phase of this model to assist in optimal learning experiences for students. Working from the premise that students are best placed to connect with instruction after a powerful and sometimes confusing learning experience, Sullivan et al.'s (2021) model provides three distinct phases to structure a mathematics lesson. They are: (1) The Launch phase--poses the task to students without any further instruction about the strategies required to solve the task; (2) The Explore phase--where collaboration and peer learning is encouraged as a support for students to consider multiple solutions and solution pathways; and (3) The Summarise/Review phase--provides an opportunity for the teacher to orchestrate class discussions by presenting various student solutions that reflect the mathematical focus of the lesson. The authors conclude they have been pleasantly surprised at how particular student explanations, derived from real time spotlight moments, were critical in shaping successful learning opportunities for the rest of the class.

Teaching assistants are not always utilised effectively in mathematics classrooms. Moreover, there is limited research examining instructional models that might more meaningfully incorporate teaching assistants into the teaching and learning of mathematics. To address this gap in the literature, the current study explored three distinct teacher-tutor dyads involved in a particular intervention program, Getting Ready in Numeracy (G.R.I.N.), from a single Australian primary school. All three tutors currently operated as teaching assistants in the classrooms of their G.R.I.N. teacher counterparts. The professional working relationships between G.R.I.N. teachers and their respective tutors were investigated through interviews. We outline common themes between the different dyads' approaches to G.R.I.N., and argue that all three dyads' practices are consistent with principles outlined in the literature around the effective utilisation of teaching assistants. We conclude by synthesising our findings, and presenting an embedded tutor model for the G.R.I.N. program. This model is presented as a prototype of good practice in a context where G.R.I.N. has been implemented successfully, whilst also serving as a more general model for how teaching assistants can be meaningfully incorporated into mathematics intervention programs.

Peter Sullivan and colleagues present a report on an initiative at a Victorian primary school which embraced opportunities offered by purposeful collaborative professional learning communities. They utilised a form of Japanese Lesson Study as part of their approach. There are three parts to the story of this initiative: (1) a description of the approach to professional learning; (2) an explanation of the model of instruction being explored; and (3) a summary of the 'polished' lesson on middle primary mathematics (fractions).

Consumer, economic and financial literacy education at school is central to active and informed citizenship. Over the past decade, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission has led various policy initiatives and influenced curriculum and resource development in this area. However, there remains a paucity of research exploring how Australian teachers make sense of and approach their work as financial literacy educators or their professional learning needs and interests in this interdisciplinary field. This article reports research exploring practising teachers' perceptions of the opportunities for financial literacy teaching and learning. Data were collected from 35 teachers in 16 Victorian primary schools. The findings suggest a need to educate teachers to: reflect upon the knowledge, skills and capabilities required to make informed financial decisions; identify and interpret the possibilities for financial literacy teaching and learning in the Australian Curriculum; and enact sophisticated pedagogical practice.

This paper reports on a New Zealand iteration of the Encouraging Persistence, Maintaining Challenge (EPMC) project, which proposes that students learn mathematics best when they build connections between mathematical ideas for themselves. This iteration explores the actions, perceptions and learning of 12 primary teachers and their 281 students during the implementation of a set of challenging tasks related to geometric reasoning. The teachers launched the suggested tasks, ensuring that the challenge was maintained. The students explored these tasks with minimal input from the teacher, and learning was summarised and extended. The teachers were positive about the intervention. The challenging task approach enabled students' thinking became visible and, at times, the teachers' prior perceptions of their students' ability were challenged. A highly significant difference between the students' pre- and post-assessment scores was found. The students were supported to have autonomy in their learning and make mathematical connections themselves. The students became less reliant on their teachers' help and were positive about their involvement in the project.

In this article, the authors emphasise the importance of purposeful mathematical discussion and using sequences of connected, cumulative, and challenging tasks in advancing students' spatial reasoning in the early years of schooling.

This article reports on a project which involved introducing challenging tasks in the early years' classrooms of twenty Victorian primary schools. The obstacles teachers encountered and how they overcame those obstacles are discussed.

The authors describe a mathematics lesson designed to allow students to use their own thinking to solve elapsed time problems. Their approach emphasises student-centered structured inquiry, and follows a 'Launch, Explore and Summarise' format.

Productive struggle leads to productive classrooms where students work on complex problems, are encouraged to take risks, can struggle and fail yet still feel good about working on hard problems (Boaler, 2016). Teachers can foster a classroom culture that values and promotes productive struggle by providing students with challenging tasks. These tasks are designed in such a way that they are accessible to all students and the expectation is that everyone will persist when solving challenging mathematical tasks. This article looks at examples of challenging mathematical tasks designed to enable students of all abilities to experience productive struggle, and examines the lesson structure and teacher's role when implementing a challenging task, along with students' responses to being challenged through the tasks. It adds to existing research on challenging tasks, including in previous editions of "Australian Primary Mathematics Classroom" (APMC) (e.g., Cheeseman, Clarke, Roche, & Walker, 2016; Roche & Clarke, 2014; Russo, 2016) through challenging tasks being used to evoke productive struggle, and illustrative examples of what productive struggle 'looks like.'

This article from Carly Sawatzki and Peter Sullivan encourages schools and teachers to consider ways to embed financial literacy tasks in mathematics lessons more often, and includes an authentic task to try with your students.

The following is a report on an investigation into ways of supporting teachers in converting challenging mathematics tasks into classroom lessons and supporting students in engaging with those tasks. Groups of primary and secondary teachers, respectively, were provided with documentation of ten lessons built around challenging tasks. Teachers responded to survey items in both Likert and free format style after teaching the ten lessons. The responses of the teacher participants indicate that the lesson structure we proposed was helpful, and the elements of the lessons suggested to teachers were both necessary and sufficient for supporting students in engaging with the challenging tasks. Implications for teacher educators and curriculum developers are offered.

The content and purpose of written unit plans in mathematics is an under-researched area. In this article, we provide a brief overview of research on teachers' planning processes and the place of mental and written plans. We report on data from a questionnaire completed by 357 teachers from Victorian Catholic primary schools, where we focused on possible elements of written unit plans for primary mathematics, and the relative importance which teachers attributed to these elements. We then discuss 48 written unit plans which were provided to us by primary schools from which the 357 teachers were drawn. There was considerable variation in the length, intended teaching time, and level of specification of key ideas in these plans. We discuss this variation, and some discrepancies between the ratings of teachers of the importance of certain elements and their presence in the plans we examined. We also suggest potentially productive areas of future enquiry.

Insights into teachers' planning of mathematics reported here were gathered as part of a broader project examining aspects of the implementation of the Australian curriculum in mathematics (and English). In particular, the responses of primary and secondary teachers to a survey of various aspects of decisions that inform their use of curriculum documents and assessment processes to plan their teaching are discussed. Teachers appear to have a clear idea of the overall topic as the focus of their planning, but they are less clear when asked to articulate the important ideas in that topic. While there is considerable diversity in the processes that teachers use for planning and in the ways that assessment information informs that planning, a consistent theme was that teachers make active decisions at all stages in the planning process. Teachers use a variety of assessment data in various ways, but these are not typically data extracted from external assessments. This research has important implications for those responsible for supporting teachers in the transition to the "Australian Curriculum: Mathematics."

This article promotes the use of mathematically appropriate, engaging and challenging tasks to support learning that is worthwhile. The authors share insights from a three-lesson design experiment and the three tasks along with the results from their implementation are explored.

At some stage in the planning process, teachers develop or select tasks which prompt the type of activity that can offer students experiences that can help them learn the intended content. This article presents results from an item on a survey that invited teachers to match particular content descriptions with selected tasks. While many teachers matched the tasks with the content descriptions that we anticipated they would, there were also many teachers who chose descriptions that we consider do not match the tasks. It is suggested that teachers should discuss within their planning teams the purpose and potential of particular tasks, and that such discussions also form part of teacher professional learning. It is recommended that the notion of matching tasks to the curriculum is incorporated into teacher learning sessions. (Contains 1 table.)

We are interested in exploring the processes teachers use when planning. We sought responses from teachers on aspects of their planning from a survey of various aspects of their decisions. We found that, while there is diversity in processes teachers use for planning, a consistent theme was that teachers make deliberative decisions at all stages in the planning process. Likewise teachers make active use of assessment information, especially to address the needs of their students. There are important implications from our findings for those who support teachers in the transition to the Australian Curriculum: Mathematics. (Contains 2 tables.)

Much research on early measurement learning is small-scale and dependent on the items used. While such research is helpful for indicating the key aspects of learning length, it does not give teachers a clear indication of the expectations for student learning of them. This paper presents substantial data from a large project that used individual interviews to assess student learning against "growth points" or key stages in children's learning, over a range of domains including length. Data from interviews conducted twice a year with more than 1000 children in each of the first three years of school are used to indicate appropriate targets for student achievement. Basically it is suggested that the key targets for the learning of length in the first three years of school are, respectively, learning to compare, learning to use a unit iteratively, and measuring using formal units. (Contains 4 tables.)

The Task Types and Mathematics Learning project is investigating the opportunities and constraints that teachers experience when using particular types of mathematics tasks. Some assumptions underlying this aspect of the project are: (1) that teachers seeking a balanced curriculum choose to use a mix of types of tasks; (2) open-ended questions offer students and teachers opportunities for both creativity and different ways of thinking about mathematics; and (3) trialling exemplars of particular types of tasks, reflecting on the experience by writing a report, and reporting back to colleagues involves substantial teacher learning, and can form the basis of sustainable professional development. This article explains what is meant by content specific open-ended tasks, illustrates the ways that teachers wrote up trials of such tasks in their classrooms, and uses excerpts from teachers' reporting on their trials at meetings of project teachers from a cluster of nearby schools, to illustrate the type of teacher learning that resulted from this process. (Contains 1 figure.)

This article illustrates a teaching exploration at an Indigenous Community School in the Kimberley region of Western Australia that sought to use a specific way of thinking about particular content domain, subtraction, to develop focused, mathematically-rich learning experiences. First, the authors explain the importance of having clear mathematical goals (knowing where you are going), and then they describe some illustrative activities (how to get there) that were used over the four 90-minute lessons. They also present data that indicate that there was positive student achievement as a result of the experience. (Contains 2 figures.)

The basic unit of school based mathematics teaching is the lesson. This article is a contribution to understanding teacher actions that facilitate successful lessons, defined as those that engage all students, especially those who may sometimes feel alienated from mathematics and schooling, in productive and successful mathematical thinking and learning. An underlying assumption is that lessons can seek to build a sense in the students that their experience has elements in common with the rest of the class and that this can be done through attention to particular aspects of the mathematical and socio-mathematical goals. We examine three teacher actions that address the mathematical goals: using open-ended tasks, preparing prompts to support students experiencing difficulty, and posing extension tasks to students who finish the set tasks quickly; as well as actions that address the socio-mathematical goals by making classroom processes explicit. To illustrate and elaborate these actions, we describe a particular lesson taught to a heterogeneous upper primary (age 11-12) class.

Examined the quality of responses of six classes of grade six students to four questions requiring multiple and generalized solutions posed under varying conditions. Results indicated that this type of question can be useful in classrooms because students can respond at a variety of levels. (13 references) (MDH)

A study of beginning elementary teachers' mathematics instruction practices sought to identify the main factors influencing those practices. For all seven teachers studied, the perceived needs and expectations of students affected planning, interactive thinking, and lesson evaluation. (GLR)

It is frequently surprising to new teachers (and even those with experience) when they find that not only do some children need to recount the group they have just counted to be assured of the total but also that this need seems to be resistant to intervention. Although moving from "counting-all" to "count-on" is sometimes assumed to be constrained by developmental factors, it is the teacher's responsibility to continually explore methods and pedagogies for accelerating such transitions. Similarly, it is surprising how difficult some students seem to find answering questions like 32 + 10, 95 - 10, 326 + 100, etc. Although many students in Year 1 may begin to grasp place value in an elementary sense, applying this knowledge dynamically (i.e., as a number changes), rather than statistically (i.e., to an individual number), is often a far slower process. Moreover, it is difficult to find the right experiences to help students develop fluency in flexibly applying their knowledge of place value to solve such problems. In this short article, the authors present the principle of Dynamic Counting, and a set of activities related to this principle, as a teaching tool that might be useful in addressing both of these issues.

Attitudes, beliefs, and practice teaching experience of one preservice elementary school teacher in her final year of studies and first year of teaching were examined to investigate constraints preventing the translation of educational theory into classroom practices in mathematics instruction. Results indicate that observed teaching practices contradicted stated beliefs and intentions. (21 references) (MDH)