Effective teamwork and collaboration are important between students, between students and teachers and among colleagues. The members of my maths department collaborate formally on a weekly basis with a shared goal of improving learners' outcomes. The weekly departmental meetings provide us with opportunities to learn from and with each other on an ongoing basis, to engage in professional conversation about the implementation of different teaching approaches and to get constructive feedback on our own teaching. We also promote horizontal and vertical collaboration with teachers in different departments by planning and designing maths exploration activities for students. For instance, we collaborated with the IT teachers to plan an exploration activity on Statistics by working with spreadsheets. We also provide opportunities for students to assume their shared responsibility for collaborative work by including group activities in our classroom. This teaching approach helps students to learn interactively and efficiently by improving their critical thinking, problem solving and communication skills.

Teaching through local and global contexts would signify practices relating to real-life applications, situations and activities which give meaning to the mathematics classroom. For example, when teaching mathematical modelling, we can relate the topic to real-life situations involving business decisions, investments and public health both locally and globally. Teaching students through concrete things and real-life contexts before moving to abstraction motivates them to explore, understand and appreciate the concepts. It also increases significantly the curiosity and learning of students.

Teaching informed by assessment is a good approach to develop an informed understanding of where the students are in their learning. Both formative and summative assessment are important tools in helping learners to progress their learning. As a formative assessment, I have implemented a quick check routine where students use cardboards with smileys (happy, moderate or unhappy) throughout the lesson to assess their progress towards the learning objective. This approach helps me to determine the next steps of the lesson sequence, like whether the majority of the class could go away and complete the task independently or those who are still unsure could continue the work with more scaffolding from their peers or the teacher. We also set summative assessments during midterm and at the end of the year to assess students’ long-term retention of the concepts learnt. This can be used to help students identify their areas of strengths and weaknesses, targeted areas to work on and the common misconceptions. It also provides teachers with useful information to cater for interventions and support for students who are struggling in maths.

Using projects in my classes that are open ended has been a good experience. The students are typically more engaged because they can relate the mathematics with things that they enjoy. This also helps develop the ideas and concepts. Because the projects are open ended they need to know the concepts, not just how to solve the equation.

One thing that I enjoy having in is note or question packages which have various "levels" of questions. When students can find the level they are at they can then use that to gauge where they need to find and practice skills they need for the upcoming summative assessment. They can then see where they have challenges and where they have needs to be met. This helps differentiate learning as each student can work that there "level" or can try to progress through the "levels" to understanding.

2)    Visible thinking allows students to organize and share their thinking with others. Students often have a fear of sharing thoughts or ideas because of the fear of being wrong. Visible thinking activities enable them to share and gain ideas and affirmation from other students. They can see that other students have similar thoughts and ideas.

3)    Differentiated teaching has taken on a different meaning for me and how I use it in the classroom. I have had limited success trying to accommodate learning styles. What has worked is adapting situations and questions to the individual student that needs something different. I adjust my teaching style for students of differing abilities, meaning the difficulty level. I also change the questions for students who struggle.