Optimising Classroom Learning: Speaking in and about Mathematics Classrooms

Abstract

Many of the processes by which educational phenomena are experienced and by which the products of the learning process are enacted are essentially social. In this presentation, we report the key findings from three complementary projects:

• the optimisation of student learning when engaged in individual, pair and collaborative group work (The Social Unit of Learning Project),
• the role of teacher selective attention in facilitating teacher professional learning (The Learning from Lessons Project) and
• the identification and promotion of the professional language by which teachers in Australia and eight other countries interact with and reflect upon the events of the mathematics classroom (The International Lexicon Project).

We discuss the ways in which “the social” can shape and even constitute the learning of students and teachers, and the implications of the project findings for the optimal functioning of the classroom as a site for student and teacher learning.

Speaker

About the Speaker

Professor David Clarke is Director of the International Centre for Classroom Research (ICCR) at the University of Melbourne. Over the last twenty years, his research activity has centred on capturing the complexity of classroom practice through a program of international video-based classroom research in more than 20 countries. Other significant research has addressed teacher professional learning, metacognition, problem-based learning, assessment, multi-theoretic research designs, cross-cultural analyses, curricular alignment, the challenge of research synthesis in education, and the establishment of the Science of Learning Research Classroom at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. Professor Clarke has written books on assessment and on classroom research and has published his research work in around 200 book chapters, journal articles and conference proceedings papers. Website: http://www.djclarke.iccr.edu.au/

Dr. Man Ching Esther CHAN is a registered psychologist who specialises in educational psychology and assessment. She joined the ICCR in late-2014 as a Research Fellow. Prior to joining the centre, she worked on several Australian Government funded projects in student wellbeing and achievement, early literacy assessment, and school retention. Since working at the ICCR, she has been involved in the Learning From Lessons project and acted as the project manager for The Social Unit of Learning project. She was awarded the Endeavour Research Fellowship by the Australian Government and took a leave of absence from the ICCR in August 2015 to spend six months at the University of California Berkeley to explore the notions of stability and change in formative assessment. She will officially re-join the ICCR in March 2016.

Date

01 March 2016 (Tuesday), 12:45 - 02:00pm

Location

Room 205, 2nd Floor, Runme Shaw Building , HKU

Chair

Dr. Ida Mok