During the week I was talking to Michael Ymer, our resident maths educator, who coaches teachers on maths instruction. He was describing a rich maths task he had set years 5/6 students during a model lesson and the various exit points he had set to differentiate the challenge for students. The challenging task once set and understood by students allowed him to rove around and spot students having problems and then provide individual or small group instruction.
The point he made was that as students move into the middle years of schooling we need to flip the traditional triangle of instruction [concepts – skills – applications] so that we teach through applications or rich challenging tasks. So often we see middle years teachers still engaged in teaching the skills [e.g. multiple algorithms in text books] and not through their application.
