I had the opportunity to observe Lottie’s session with Isabella. Lottie introduced her to algebra. Given the significance of this area in Maths, I find that this moment is vital for students who are starting to learn it and there may be trouble if they don’t grasp the initial concepts involved. I find that students can get caught up in the new vocabulary and the new ways of expressing already familiar operations such as multiplication. Lottie methodically introduced her student to algebra in various stages, starting with familiarising her with the terminology – ‘pronumeral’, ‘terms’, etc., which was an excellent starting point. Her explanation aided her student in understanding that the lowercase letters are used to represent an unknown number, and that sometimes you cannot ‘solve’ these equations as they may just be “expressions” (which had been a point of confusion for the student). Lottie worked through the various forms of algebraic questions – equivalence, simplification, substitution and expression writing; engaging her student with each by getting her to independently solve questions. By doing this, Lottie could immediately identify the faults in her student’s thinking process as her student would describe back to her how she attempted to solve the question – and Lottie could swiftly correct it. Her attitude was encouraging and eager to answer any questions her student had. A great aid in helping her student understand adding like terms conceptually was by comparing it to fractions – this use of comparison, with a topic that the student is familiar with is a great and quick way to get a student to better understand what they need to do and why. She continually reminded her student of the algebraic conventions, such as how multiplication is not expressed by using the multiplication sign – as well as explaining what words such as ‘sum’ and ‘product’ mean. By covering these details early within this topic, Lottie is helping her student in the coming weeks and in the future where she will certainly engage with the topic in school until the HSC. Overall, it was a great session to observe, thank you Lottie!

Sofala Vogt