Mathematical Power

What does mathematical power mean? In our view it is having strategies that help students to:

• Persevere
• Organise their thinking
• Work smart
• Explain their ideas 
• Risk take

And they need to Understand their thinking and take Pride in their achievements. All in all, they need to be able to POWER UP!

It is easy to shut down when faced with a challenging problem or some maths that as yet is just a bit tough. As educators we need to face the fact that we have not necessarily helped students to learn strategies for persistence and self regulation. Also as educators we may have been giving counter-productive messages based on:

• too little time allowed for thinking
• too little expectation that students can think if we leave them alone a little bit longer
• over emphasis on right answers, ticks and crosses and one particular method
• offering praise for effort (stickers etc)

rather than involving students in identifying for themselves and taking pride when they have powered up.

The purpose of our POWER UP pack is to offer busy teachers strategies for encouraging and making visible the types of thinking processes that can help students take control of themselves as learners.

The POWER UP posters work well alongside the STAR posters and bring the focus to the way a student is feeling at each stage of the STAR, providing support strategies for sticking with a task.

Teachers trialling the posters have made the following comments:

"I hadn’t really thought about helping my students POWER UP in this way before. The posters are really helpful and the students related to them easily."

"I wish I had been offered this earlier in life. I didn’t have stickability in maths and I haven’t tried to teach my students this kind of stickability either."

"I am going to print these 4 to a page and get my students to paste them into their problem solving books as a reminder."