In order for your numeracy strategy to be effective, you need to consider your answers to the following questions. These questions are in the worksheets and are the same as what you’ll find in your assessment template.
Here’s a list of the questions below. Then we’ll work through each one. If you know what to do here, just skip ahead to the assessment template.
- Can you provide a breakdown of the specific numeracy skill areas?
- What kinds of specific literacy competencies or practices do you expect to see?
Can you provide a breakdown of the specific numeracy skill areas?
In your strategy, you should have picked one or two numeracy progressions to focus on. These are the numeracy skill areas that you want to develop. These should be based on what you identified when you did the mapping exercise as part of Assessment 3.
For example, you might say something like this:
- One area I want to focus on is using a range of different partitioning strategies to solve the kinds of addition and subtraction problems that students need to do mentally when they are working outside.
- Another area I intend to include is some work on place value and measurement. Because we use metric rulers and tapes in the workshop it’s important that learners know that 1mm is the same as 1/1000th of a metre. They need to know what this looks like and how we convert from one to the other.
What kinds of specific numeracy competencies or practices do you expect to see?
We talked about this earlier in relation to literacy. Here’s a recap:
- As your learners gain stronger literacy skills you should see some of their behaviours change in positive ways. We refer to these behaviours as “competencies” or “practices”.
- A competency is the ability to do something successfully or efficiently.
- Practices are the actual application of a literacy or numeracy skill.
Here’s an example of what you might write:
- What I hope to see is some gains in learners general number knowledge, but in particular, I’d like to see them understand place value better. We might see some of these gains on the TEC assessment tool, but I think I’ll need my own assessments in place if I want to measure it more directly.
- Also, I’d like to see more discussion of maths and problem solving during our teaching time. I’d like the focus here to be more on the process of figuring out the answers to things and less about the correct answer. Learning happens in the process of solving the problem, so I need to make sure that there are lots of opportunities for them to practice this and talk about it.
What else should a good strategy have in it?
We need to look at what else you’ll need to think about when you’re writing your strategies.
To be a fully formed strategy, you’ll need to show that you’ve addressed, or at least are thinking about about, the following questions as part of your programme-level strategy:
- How are you going to deal with the opportunities or constraints that you identified?
- How are you going to make your programme more learner centred?
- How will you encourage learner independence?
- How will you use key frameworks to guide and inform your approach?
- What’s your timeframe for this?
- How are you going to evaluate your work?
We expect that your answers to these questions will change over time as you try new things and get feedback from your learners. But you will need to answer these questions for both of your strategies when you hand in this assessment.
If you want to, you can skip ahead and download the assessment template. Feel free to get started and come back here as you work through each section.
Or, if this all feels a bit new, please read on and do the workshop tasks that relate to each section. These tasks will help you with the assessment so make sure that you keep your notes handy.
