This unit focuses on enhancing your mathematical content knowledge for teaching, developing your pedagogical skills, and building your confidence, creativity, and communication abilities for teaching mathematics to primary school children. You will reflect on your experiences of learning mathematics and evaluate your understanding of the mathematics necessary for teaching primary students.
The main mathematical topics covered in this unit include measurement, space, statistics, and probability. You will assess and develop your own skills, knowledge and understanding of the concepts in these strands. You will engage in mathematical problem-solving involving rich tasks, open questions, and cross-curricular contexts as you extend your knowledge of mathematics teaching.
You will also investigate effective curriculum and teaching strategies for these topics in relation to primary school children. This will involve reviewing research on successful teaching methods, analysing teaching sequences, and applying real-world contexts. You will also explore effective mathematical models and approaches to develop deep and connected mathematical understanding.
This unit contributes to the course's intentions of strengthening the connection between theory and practice, ensuring that graduate teachers have deep and developing connected understandings of the content they are teaching and the pedagogical approaches for implementing the curriculum in mathematics (as part of the STEM curriculum). This unit also connects with the course learning outcome of demonstrating an understanding of a broad and coherent body of knowledge content, pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment in relation to the changing nature of education in a rapidly evolving global context.
On successful completion of this unit, students will be able to:
This unit is not compulsory for any specific course. Depending on the course you study, this unit may be taken as an elective.