The Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers, 490 Northbourne Avenue, Canberra, Dickson (2026)

23/06/2026

If you've been wondering how to implement strategies to help structure and support mathematical discussion in your classroom, this post is for you.

We’ve previously shared these Talk Moves resources from the NSW Department, but there’s a good reason they’ve been popular with our followers. There are posters and flashcards which summarise or go into detail on the strategies and even if you’ve seen them before, they’re well worth a second visit. They include moves like revoicing (restating a student's idea to check understanding), reasoning (asking students to justify their thinking), adding on (inviting students to build on each other's ideas), and wait time (giving students time to think before responding). Used intentionally, they can help build classrooms of rich mathematical dialogue. Access the resources here:
🔗 NSW Talk Moves https://education.nsw.gov.au/teaching-and-learning/curriculum/literacy-and-numeracy/teaching-and-learning-resources/numeracy/talk-moves

In the NSW Talk Moves, a range of teacher prompts are suggested like ‘How is your thinking similar or different?’ But what about student language? Ireland's National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) has developed a resource that complements this, again including explanations of the differing strategies, but also outlining 25 sentence stems students can use to explain their thinking like ‘___ is important because ___’
🔗 NCCA Introduction to Maths Talk:https://ncca.ie/media/5428/3-introduction_to_maths_talk.pdf

Together, these two resources cover both sides of the conversation - what teachers do and what students say.

22/06/2026

'Classrooms led by excellent teachers of mathematics are characterised by purposeful mathematical dialogue. Students are encouraged to explain, justify, question, and build on one another's ideas.' That’s a quote from our recently released paper, Towards Excellence in Teaching Mathematics, and this is at the heart of this week’s social media theme, Mathematical dialogue and discussion. It’s also one of the twelve key strategies outlined in our position paper Pedagogy in Mathematics, within the Developing Mathematical Proficiency practice.

So, this week we're exploring what purposeful mathematical dialogue looks like in the classroom.
To get you started, we’re recommending this short video from the Education Endowment Foundation which explores how to incorporate mathematical discussions in the primary classroom, why it’s important for teachers to model effective mathematical discussion and outlines what effective listening looks like in practice:
🔗 EEF video – Modelling effective mathematical discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NezanhuDJ-U

When students articulate their mathematical reasoning - even tentatively or imperfectly - they give teachers a window into how they're thinking. Misconceptions can be uncovered and addressed.

Teachers play a critical role in structuring meaningful dialogue, by intentionally planning discussions aligned with learning goals, anticipating likely responses and selecting and connecting student contributions. When done well, such dialogue allows students to clarify their thinking, make connections and deepen conceptual understanding.

You can access the AAMT resources referred to in this post through our website:
🔗 Towards Excellence in Teaching Mathematics - https://go.aamt.edu.au/towards-excellence
🔗 Pedagogy in Mathematics - https://aamt.edu.au/teachers/pedagogy-in-maths/

19/06/2026

We know that not everyone follows football, so today we’re sharing something light-hearted but that might interest our non-soccer loving maths teachers. It’s a blog post from UK maths teacher Jo Morgan, who ran a ‘World Cup of Maths’ asking secondary teachers what topics they loved to teach: Hundreds of teachers voted and the semi-finals included trig, indices, quadratics and surds. Click the link to find the winner: 🔗 https://www.resourceaholic.com/2017/01/world-cup-of-maths.html.

This set us wondering:
▪ What are your favourite topics to teach?
▪ Why were some big topics like Linear graphs and Similarity and Congruence so unpopular?
▪ Is there a link between topics students traditionally find hard or easy to learn and the topics that teachers enjoy teaching?
▪ How does your personal enjoyment (or otherwise) of a topic influence your teaching?

We’d love to know your thoughts – please share your favourite concept to teach in the comments below…

And for our non-football loving teachers – normal service will be resumed next week. Have a great weekend!

18/06/2026

"I'm too pretty to do math" - on sale right now at MYER by Australian brand Lioness.

See what our CEO, Allan Dougan had to say about it in yesterday's The Sydney Morning Herald, Brisbane Times and other papers.

This is the kind of message that tells girls their appearance and their intellect are in competition. They are not!!

Share if you agree.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/girls-being-told-they-re-too-pretty-to-do-math-is-degrading-20260616-p607b4.html?utm_source=smh-web&utm_medium=share_article&utm_campaign=national&utm_content=subscriber+alldigital&utm_term=product_feature

18/06/2026

We’re spending a couple of days looking at maths and football as the World Cup heats up. While yesterday focused on basic statistics, today we consider the complex mathematics of predicting the likely winners – a challenging exercise in mathematical modelling and probability simulation - and explore more opportunities to conduct a data investigation.

This article in the Conversation from Steven Stern, Professor of Data Science at Bond University, discusses some of the complexities involved in making predictions: 🔗 theconversation.com/i-built-a-maths-model-to-simulate-the-world-cup-a-million-times-find-out-your-teams-chances-276386. It outlines a methodology Stern has used, to identify the three teams most likely to win: Spain, France and Argentina. Sadly, this modelling gives the Socceroos only a ~0.3% chance of winning, but with a respectable 67% chance of reaching the knockout round.

However, this article was written before the tournament commenced, so these predictions are already out of date (hello conditional probability and go Socceroos!) and like most models, it needs constant updating as more information becomes available.

For the classroom, even if the underlying modelling is very complex, there’s lots of opportunity for rich mathematical discussion, through statistical interpretation of the data displays and of the numeracy information scattered throughout the text.

We also love this Youcubed data visualisation on expected goals 🔗https://www.youcubed.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Womens-Soccer-1.pdf which provides a rich stimulus for a data talk.

Finally, the FIFA website is itself a rich source of statistics that could be used to support a data or probability investigation. There’s almost everything you’d want to know about any team, with stats including number of crosses, free kicks and passes – a ready-made data set for a class investigation. Here’s the data for Australia: https://www.fifa.com/en/tournaments/mens/worldcup/canadamexicousa2026/teams/australia/stats.
Meanwhile, at the individual player level, FIFA will be using all the data collected during matches to calculate Power Rankings to identify which players are at the top of their game: https://www.fifa.com/en/tournaments/mens/worldcup/canadamexicousa2026/articles/what-are-the-fifa-power-rankings-powered-by-aramco. Again, this could provide a good context to analyse statistical and mathematical data in an authentic context – challenging the notion of ‘when will we ever use this?’

17/06/2026

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is underway – so we’re suggesting a few resources today and tomorrow that could help you bring football into the classroom.

SBS Learn have created a range of football-themed activities to coincide with their 2026 World Cup coverage: 🔗 https://www.sbs.com.au/learn/resources/celebrate-the-world-of-football/. There’s some maths content, but the resource probably works best as a cross-curricular unit in a primary context, though it includes a secondary activity - planning a trip to the tournament - bringing in financial maths and budgeting.

Another good resource that could be readily adapted to the current World Cup is Cool.org's Maths and the Matildas lesson series. Younger students can explore jersey numbers or graph results, while middle primary students could conduct their own table-top football data investigation:
🔗 cool.org/unit/math-and-matildas

Building on this, reSolve's Sport Stats sequence could also be adapted to develop conceptual understanding of the mean using Unifix cubes, across the different 2026 World Cup groups: 🔗 resolve.edu.au/v84-sequences/sport-stats

16/06/2026

When a meteorologist says there is a 70% chance of rain tomorrow, what does that actually mean?
It is a probability estimate - derived from patterns in an enormous amount of data, processed through mathematical models. The BOM supercomputer alone is capable of more than 1,600 trillion calculations per second!

Weather forecasting is one of the most mathematically sophisticated activities in everyday life, and the Bureau has published a clear explainer on how it works 🔗 https://media.bom.gov.au/social/blog/1696/explainer-how-meteorologists-forecast-the-weather/. For younger students, this short ‘How is Weather Predicted?’ video 🔗 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78eq20GMBsE is a more accessible starting point.

To make their predictions, meteorologists draw on a range of sources: weather observations - surface stations, weather balloons, satellites and radar, numerical weather prediction models - mathematical equations describing atmospheric physics solved at billions of points and their own knowledge and experience of local weather patterns. Given the complexity of weather systems and the range of data points involved, the mathematics involved in weather prediction is far from simple.

For classroom use, the AAMT Maths Inside series of lessons Modelling Climate Changes 🔗 https://www.mathseducation.org.au/online-resources/maths-inside/modelling-climate-changes/ brings this to a more manageable scale. The lessons include activities on measuring rainfall, modelling climate variability across Australia, and exploring how small changes in temperature and rainfall affect local agriculture.

Over the last eight days we've explored maths and the weather from the earliest primary years through to senior secondary - from seeing thermometers as number lines and exploring First Nations seasonal calendars, to real data investigations and the mathematical modelling behind forecasting.

The weather has been outside every classroom window all week. We hope some of these resources help bring it inside. The next time a student asks why they need to learn mathematics, the weather app on their phone is an honest answer.

15/06/2026

Last week we noted that the Australian Curriculum embeds First Nations seasonal knowledge into mathematics from Foundation through to Year 3. Today, we share some examples of what that looks like.

Australia has a range of seasons. Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples recognise a number of distinct seasons that vary by Country and language group, driven by ecological and environmental indicators: the flowering of particular plants, the behaviour of animals, the direction of winds, the rise of stars. This is sophisticated, accumulated knowledge, refined over tens of thousands of years of observation on Country.

The Bureau of Meteorology (the BOM) website hosts a wide range of Indigenous Seasonal Calendars documented in partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities from across Australia 🔗 https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledge/indigenous-seasonal-calendars.
Each calendar is specific to Country and reflects both the ecological and climatic diversity across Australia, and the deep knowledge held by traditional owners.
These calendars are also mathematically rich. They raise questions that are genuinely worth exploring with students, such as ‘How do you partition a year without a fixed number of equal divisions?’ or ‘How might seasonal knowledge be represented mathematically, and what are the limitations of those representations?’

Two related resources worth bookmarking:
▪ ABC Education's Many Lands, Many Seasons series 🔗 https://www.abc.net.au/education/digibooks/many-lands-many-seasons/101745488 which explores six Aboriginal seasonal calendars through short videos.

▪ The CSIRO website 🔗 https://www.csiro.au/en/research/indigenous-science/Indigenous-knowledge/Calendars, which presents a series of Indigenous seasonal calendars in visual poster-style form.

The BOM, ABC and CSIRO resources are a starting point. But the most valuable knowledge about seasonal patterns on your local Country sits with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community in your area. Before teaching this content, consider reaching out - your local Land Council, Aboriginal Community organisation, or school's Aboriginal Education Consultant can help ensure what you share with students is accurate, appropriate and respectful.

Incorporating First Nations knowledge into mathematics is not simply a matter of inclusion - it is part of what it means to teach the curriculum and all students well. From the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures cross-curriculum priority to AITSL Professional Standard 2.4, we all have a professional duty to provide opportunities for students to develop understanding of and respect for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures and languages.

Seasonal calendars are one of the most accessible and mathematically genuine entry points available to maths teachers, especially at the early primary level. What season are you in, where you live and teach?

12/06/2026

What is the best time to play outside on a school day? It sounds like a simple question - but it turns out to be a genuine statistical investigation, and the Academy of Science’s reSolve team have built a complete six-lesson sequence around exactly that question.

Statistics: Time to Play 🔗 https://resolve.edu.au/teaching-sequences/year-5/statistics-time-play is a free Year 5 sequence aligned to the Australian, Victorian, WA and NSW curricula. Students investigate what weather elements affect outdoor play, collect and represent data, access real Bureau of Meteorology historical records, and compare weather across different Australian locations.

The sequence moves through the full statistical investigation cycle:
▪ Lesson 1 - students decide which weather elements matter and plan how to collect data
▪ Lesson 2 - students access secondary data from the BOM website and import it into Excel, then represent it in ways that tell the story of the data
▪ Lessons 3-5 - students analyse the data, access historical yearly data, and use it to make predictions
▪ Lesson 6 - students compare weather data from diverse Australian locations, examining how geography shapes climate

It’s another great example of how weather is itself a rich mathematical playground.

11/06/2026

A thermometer is probably the most useful physical model we have for extending the number line to negative numbers, making temperature an ideal context to introduce integers to students. Before negative numbers appear in a formal curriculum context, most students have already encountered them - "it's minus 3 in Canberra tonight" - without necessarily understanding what that means mathematically.

A thermometer makes several critical ideas visible in a single object:
▪ It shows zero as a reference point - not as the absence of temperature, but a specific value from which we measure in two directions
▪ To teach direction - the vertical orientation of a thermometer mirrors the number line, with positive values above zero and negative values below
▪ Helping order integers - questions like "Which city is colder?" and "Is -7°C colder than -3°C?" are genuine comparison questions with a real context.
▪ When calculating difference - "If Melbourne is 19°C in December and Chicago is -2°C, what is the temperature change for a traveller flying between them?" shows integer subtraction with a real-world reason.

The Victorian Department of Education's Directed Number sequence 🔗 https://arc.educationapps.vic.gov.au/learning/sites/mathematics-lesson-plans/2128/Directed-number is a free, well-structured six-lesson sequence that uses temperature as its primary context. Students compare integers, calculate temperature differences between cities and use rounding and estimation. The Canadian city extreme temperatures resource asks students to approximate the difference between record highs and lows, some spanning more than 85 degrees - a vivid illustration of integer subtraction at scale.

The sequence is freely available and downloadable from the Victorian Arc platform and available to all Australian teachers, not just those in Victoria. The lessons are well-supported with teacher notes, student resources and worked examples.

As the days get colder, now could be a great time to ask your students what it means for a temperature to be below zero.

The Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers

23/06/2026

22/06/2026

19/06/2026

18/06/2026

18/06/2026

17/06/2026

16/06/2026

15/06/2026

12/06/2026

11/06/2026

Address

Telephone

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share

Category