Starter questions – taking the form of open-ended questions, which focus the students’ thinking in a general direction and give them a starting point. Example: How could you sort these…?
2. Questions to stimulate mathematical thinking – to assist students to focus on particular strategies and help them to see patterns and relationships. This aids the formation of developing a conceptual thinking. The questions can serve as a prompt when children become ‘stuck’. Example: Can you group these … in some way?
3. Assessment questions – encourage students to explain what they are doing or how they arrived at a solution. Allowing me to see how the children are thinking, what they understand and what level they are operating at. Example: How did you find that out?
4. Final discussion questions – these questions draw together the efforts of the group and prompt sharing and comparison of strategies and solutions. This is considered a vital phase in the mathematical thinking processes, providing further opportunity for reflection and realisation of mathematical ideas and relationships and encourages children to evaluate their work.
Examples: Do you think we have found the best solution ?
I found during the year 7s sessions, they preferred to work as a group compared to the year 8s mainly worked pairs. This is probably because they were still familiarising themselves with what a prime number was. On both sessions, I found that communicating with both groups, the children was fond of engaging activities where they were allowed to discuss and share their
Despite these ideas, reading Watson’s (2008, p. 8) article, I am still assessing whether I be ‘ready’ to teach good mathematics equally be a good maths teacher, and vice versa?, “It would be possible to become qualified and never have to think through a single aspect of school mathematics from scratch”, and “to achieve and demonstrate every guideline, every list item, every criterion of every whole-school initiative and still not really work hard on how to help your students understand mathematics better than their existing expectations, and better than the school’s grade predic
