Australian schools, like schools elsewhere, have been through a period of closure. The closure creates both threats and opportunities for teachers and students. In the context of a project exploring approaches to teaching in early years, we outline some considerations and offer advice to teachers and educators on strategies for welcoming students…

Peter Sullivan and colleagues present a report on an initiative at a Victorian primary school which embraced opportunities offered by purposeful collaborative professional learning communities. They utilised a form of Japanese Lesson Study as part of their approach. There are three parts to the story of this initiative: (1) a description of the…

The current study explores how teachers report using enabling and extending prompts when teaching with sequences of challenging mathematical tasks. Twenty-nine early years primary school teachers completed a questionnaire following their participation in a professional learning project. Findings suggest that teachers': view prompts as important…

This paper outlines the rationale for, and some elements of, a particular approach to teaching and learning mathematics in the early years. The researchers worked with two school systems to offer both centrally delivered and school-based teacher professional learning, which included the application of illustrative teaching resources. The project…

This article reports on a project which involved introducing challenging tasks in the early years' classrooms of twenty Victorian primary schools. The obstacles teachers encountered and how they overcame those obstacles are discussed.

Just as students experience productive struggle or spend time in the 'zone of confusion' when engaging with challenging tasks, teachers also experience similar difficulties and periods of confusion when engaging with new pedagogical approaches. Prior to a 19-week lockdown due to Coronavirus (COVID-19) during 2020, two Foundation teachers…

All students should have access to learning experiences that help them make sense of important mathematical concepts. This study highlights teacher actions for consolidating student learning during teacher-lead discussion in the early years. We report on a case study of a Year 1 teacher involving a lesson observation. Highlights of the lesson…

This paper reports on a New Zealand iteration of the Encouraging Persistence, Maintaining Challenge (EPMC) project, which proposes that students learn mathematics best when they build connections between mathematical ideas for themselves. This iteration explores the actions, perceptions and learning of 12 primary teachers and their 281 students…

In this article, the authors emphasise the importance of purposeful mathematical discussion and using sequences of connected, cumulative, and challenging tasks in advancing students' spatial reasoning in the early years of schooling.

It is frequently surprising to new teachers (and even those with experience) when they find that not only do some children need to recount the group they have just counted to be assured of the total but also that this need seems to be resistant to intervention. Although moving from "counting-all" to "count-on" is sometimes…

Productive struggle leads to productive classrooms where students work on complex problems, are encouraged to take risks, can struggle and fail yet still feel good about working on hard problems (Boaler, 2016). Teachers can foster a classroom culture that values and promotes productive struggle by providing students with challenging tasks. These…

As part of a project exploring the use of challenging mathematical tasks, data from New Zealand teachers and their students were analysed to explore teachers' actions that encouraged students to persist. Rather than rescuing the students when they needed help, the teachers' actions included arranging for and encouraging students to work…

Highly capable mathematics students are not usually considered strugglers. This paper reports on a case study of a Year 6 student, Debbie, her response to a lesson, and her learning involving a challenging mathematical task. Debbie, usually a highly capable student, struggled to complete a challenging mathematical task by herself, but as the…

This paper examines the learning by students who were participating in a project designed to promote persistence while working on mathematical tasks. We examined their learning of mathematics concepts and learning about the processes of engaging in mathematical tasks. There were substantial increases in students' knowledge of angles and also…

As part of a project exploring various aspects of teachers' choice and use of challenging mathematics tasks, we sought some responses from students on their preferences for the difficulty of tasks on which they might work and also on the ways of working. Despite the common finding that teachers are reluctant to pose challenges to their students…