Of the five sessions we observed involving numeracy, four involved the teaching of number functions and three involved measurement. Specific numeracy teaching techniques are shown in the table below.
| Estimating | 5 |
|---|---|
| Calculating | 5 |
| Measuring | 3 |
| Worksheet | 2 |
| Using calculator | 2 |
| Interpreting data | 1 |
| Counting | 1 |
| Using basic facts | 1 |
The teaching of numeracy that we observed was probably more structured and consistent overall than the teaching of other literacy, numeracy and language components. A typical teaching session would involve the teacher demonstrating and explaining a particular mathematical process - for example:
| T: | OK, with a twenty four hour clock, the day starts after midnight, and the first hour reads at one o’clock when the time is past one o’clock that afternoon, so one o’clock then becomes thirteen hundred, OK, and is ‘one hundred hours’, in fact all the time, so two am is written as 0200, and said, ‘O two hundred hours’. Ten o’clock am is written 1000 hours, four o’clock pm is 1600 and so on… |
The teacher started with simple examples and then progressed to more difficult ones, all the time checking that the students understood her examples.
Learners would then typically be set some exercises based on the teaching demonstration. In one case, the teacher encouraged the learners to do the exercises independently and then to review and discuss their answers in small groups or pairs; this group then marked their work with the teacher writing the learners’ answers on the whiteboard and prompting debate when answers differed among the group members. In other sessions, the teacher would typically move around the learners while they were working on the exercises, commenting on their progress and working individually with those who were struggling.
In some cases, there was no group teaching at the beginning; these teachers would hand out worksheets and then work with learners individually. One teacher explained in her interview:
The other thing we do have is worksheets - we didn’t have time today - but I have some worksheets targeted for different people or we have a folder and they can just choose what they want from it. We try different ways of doing this and there’s numeracy in there. So sometimes people will take the numeracy worksheets to work on, and sometimes if someone says that’s what they want, I’ll bring in a worksheet to target that particular aspect.