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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.

Just as students experience productive struggle or spend time in the 'zone of confusion' when engaging with challenging tasks, teachers also experience similar difficulties and periods of confusion when engaging with new pedagogical approaches. Prior to a 19-week lockdown due to Coronavirus (COVID-19) during 2020, two Foundation teachers implemented a student-centred pedagogical approach when teaching with challenging tasks. While they had some initial success implementing the pedagogical approach and a three-phase lesson structure, they struggled to do so online during the lockdown. It is the experiences of these teachers, in particular their experience of confusion relating to aspects of the pedagogical approach, and how this confusion was overcome, that is reported in this paper. Central to our findings is the importance of teachers reflecting on their own experiences of struggle and the impact this had on their professional learning, as well as the notion that adversity can be a catalyst for change.

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.

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.

In this article, the authors from Monash University and the University of Sydney have collaborated to present a research-informed model to support the planning and teaching of mathematics, using a student centred structured inquiry approach.

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.

Australian schools, like schools elsewhere, have been through a period of closure. The closure creates both threats and opportunities for teachers and students. In the context of a project exploring approaches to teaching in early years, we outline some considerations and offer advice to teachers and educators on strategies for welcoming students back to school.

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.

This article reports the findings of classroom research exploring the potential of posing challenging mathematical problems situated in real-world financial contexts to activate mathematical knowledge, skills and reasoning. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 mathematical literacy assessment framework (OECD, 2013) provided theoretical framing for the study, which examined the use of a "financial dilemma" titled "Shopping for shoes" in a Year 5/6 composite class in a suburban Australian primary school. The social and mathematical dimensions of the task, together with a particular lesson structure, successfully engaged 10 to 12-year-old students in exploring mathematics through a financial problem-solving experience. The findings reveal that students' notions of friendship and fairness guided the way they "formulated" the problem and "employed" mathematics. Strategies intended to encourage students to "interpret" the alignment and reasonableness of their social and mathematical thinking against the problem context were critical to the lesson.

As part of a research and professional development project that focused on the opportunities and constraints provided by different kinds of mathematical tasks, a group of 67 primary and 40 secondary practising teachers of mathematics were asked to complete a survey focusing on their use of tasks. In this article, we discuss responses to one particular item which sought teachers' ideas on taking a fraction comparison task (which is larger: 2/3 or 201/301?) and converting it into a mathematics lesson in the middle years of schooling. Drawing upon a number of components of "mathematical knowledge for teaching" as a framework, we attempt to examine those aspects of mathematical knowledge which are involved in making such a conversion. Our recommendation following this analysis is that greater emphasis is necessary in professional development settings on taking a potentially useful task and converting it into a worthwhile mathematics learning experience for students. Knowing the relevant mathematics also seems necessary even if not sufficient to make this conversion. (Contains 4 tables and 1 note.)

Middle school students have been pervasively described in the research literature as exhibiting disaffection, disengagement, and a lack of interest in mathematics classrooms. This study investigated this notion empirically using students' own voice on their wishes for mathematics learning to see if they characterise themselves in this way in their self-reports. Over 3500 Australian middle school students responded to a free-format prompt and reported diverse but overwhelmingly positive aspirations related to intrinsic motivational features inherent in their disposition and to extrinsic factors in their environment, such as the learning context and activities provided. Evidence of all four goal orientations was found in the students' responses but most noticeably for the productive mastery-approach orientation. When these students described what they wish for in their mathematics classrooms, they mentioned challenging work, interesting work, and opportunities to collaborate.

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 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.

The Encouraging Persistence Maintaining Challenge (EMPC) Project has been working with secondary teachers in Melbourne as they seek to build persistence in students, during work on challenging mathematics tasks. The authors have developed sequences of tasks in various topic areas for Years 7 and 8, which require students to connect different aspects of mathematics, to devise solution strategies for themselves and to explore more than one pathway to solutions. There is an expectation that students record the steps in their solutions, and justify their thinking to the teacher and other students. The authors have surveyed teachers on their strategies for encouraging student persistence, before and after the experience of teaching some challenging tasks which have been provided to them. This article provides examples of the kinds of challenging tasks teachers are using with students, and share teacher insights on helpful strategies.

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."

Under the auspices of its 'Education Revolution', the Federal Labor Government is currently implementing a national curriculum for schools. Representing an important intervention into educational practice and governance, the Australian Curriculum offers a unique research opportunity, providing substantial scope for the examination of the changing systems and school-level practices entailed in large-scale curriculum reform. Research into the Australian Curriculum also presents a valuable opportunity to develop educational research methodologies that attend to the complex and multifaceted processes of curriculum reform, from systems to classrooms. Taking two of the disciplinary towers of modern curricula (English and mathematics) and Australia's two largest jurisdictions (New South Wales and Victoria) as the focus, this article draws on a three-year Australian Research Council Linkage Project to outline an approach to researching major curriculum reform.

This article draws on the outcomes of a 4-year project where complex instruction was used as the basis for a reform in mathematics teaching in remote Aboriginal communities in Australia. The article describes the overall project in terms of the goals and aspirations for learning mathematics among remote Indigenous Australians. Knowing that the approach had been successful in a diverse setting in California, the project team sought to implement and evaluate the possibilities of such reform in a context in which the need for a culturally responsive pedagogy was critical. Elements of complex instruction offered considerable possibilities in aligning with the cultures of the remote communities, but with recognition of the possibility that some elements may not be workable in these contexts. Complex instruction also valued deep knowledge of mathematics rather than a tokenistic, impoverished mathematics. The strategies within complex instruction allowed for mathematical and cultural scaffolding to promote deep learning in mathematics. Such an approach was in line with current reforms in Indigenous education in Australia where there are high expectations of learners in order to break away from the deficit thinking that has permeated much education in remote Australia. The overall intent is to demonstrate what pedagogies are possible within the constraints of the remote context.

It is widely accepted that mathematical learning builds upon students' prior knowledge and understandings, and their identities. In this study, this phenomenon is explored with indigenous students in remote community schools in outback Australia. Through one-on-one task-based interviews, it was found that these students had some clear understandings of the measurement concepts involved, although these understandings were often idiosyncratic to these students in this context. The task-based one-on-one interview gave better insights into students' knowledge than the written form of the National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy assessment. Nevertheless, the students' conceptions provide a useful basis upon which to build subsequent knowledge, understanding and skills in the forms required by the formal mathematics curriculum.

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.

The Australian Curriculum: Mathematics encourages teachers to consider seriously the four proficiencies: Understanding, Fluency, Problem Solving and Reasoning. In responding to the reasoning proficiency, many teachers may find that the language of the classroom may well change. In this article, we discuss the meaning given to the term reasoning within the AC:M and elsewhere, share an example of a classroom task with the potential to develop mathematical reasoning, consider the language involved in describing reasoning, and present some survey responses on teachers' current understanding and use of the relevant terms. (Contains 3 tables, 2 figures and 1 footnote.)

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.)

In recent years, there has been greater attention in research and professional development work to discussion of the kinds of knowledge teachers need to teach effectively in the mathematics classroom. It seems reasonable that in planning at the school level, teaching team level and then specifically for a given lesson, teachers might have a sense of the most important mathematical ideas on which they wish to focus. In this article, we discuss written statements by teachers in surveys regarding the most important ideas on which they intended to focus in their next teaching topic. There was considerable variation in teachers' capacity to articulate these important ideas. We discuss the implications of this for teacher professional learning and planning. (Contains 1 footnote.)

The Australian Curriculum: Mathematics (AC:M) prompts consideration of planning processes teachers typically use (as a whole school, in grade levels, and at the classroom level). In order to gain insights into the nature of the planning decisions teachers make, Australian teachers drawn from every state and territory were invited to respond to a survey on planning processes, during professional learning programs or voluntarily online through the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers' website. In this article, we provide background to the overall project in which this survey was situated, and describe the process through which the survey was developed. Subsequent articles in this journal detail some important findings from the survey data. (Contains 1 table and 1 footnote.)

Essential to teachers' planning are decisions regarding what should be taught. Curriculum documents are the most obvious authority. But what is a "curriculum document" for a mathematics teacher in Australia? Are there other credible sources of information that Australian teachers draw on when deciding what to teach? This article examines the responses of a national sample of Australian teachers to a survey examining their planning practices. (Contains 2 figures.)

Various explanations and solutions have been proposed over the last decade in relation to the implications of students' apparent lack of engagement with middle years schooling in Australia. This article reports on responses to a questionnaire by 333 Year 8 students (aged about 13, in the second year of high school) on perceptions of factors relating to their engagement with the academic curriculum. While the majority of students reported a strong sense of the importance of, and opportunities in, schooling, and saw English, mathematics and science connected to those opportunities, this orientation was not matched by corresponding positive engagement with these same subjects. There was diversity in the responses of students, and it is recommended that schools take steps to identify individual students' perceptions of factors influencing their engagement, and where appropriate, deal with those perceptions. (Contains 7 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.)

Many students are unsuccessful in the study of school mathematics, not because of some innate ability, but because of pedagogical practices. Bernstein (1996) has argued that pedagogy serves as a mechanism for cultural reproduction, so that for those students whose cultures are different from that represented in and through pedagogy, the task of constructing school mathematics is made more difficult. The paper explores the ways in which a teacher changes the pedagogic relay in order to be more inclusive of her students. Her practice is informed by understanding the ways in which pedagogy is a subtle tool for marginalization in mathematics.

Presents perspectives and issues associated with developments in teacher education in Australia, considering factors that affect teacher education nationally and discussing specific state-based influences on preservice and inservice teacher education. The paper suggests that teacher educators can initiate debate in the education community about the goals and purpose of teacher education. (SM)