After our last learning block with Charles Lovitt and Doug Clarke, Pete and I came back to school bursting with lesson ideas we wanted to try. Our enthusiasm was somewhat curtailed by…. NAPLAN!

After wallowing in pity about how we can prepare our students for the standardised test, we came to the realisation that we could ‘reverse engineer’ NAPLAN style questions and turn them into open-ended questions that stimulate class discussion and allow students to show their understanding in a number of ways. Rejoice!

To do this, Pete and I looked at NAPLAN questions that had given our students some trouble in the past and looked at ways to ‘open them up’! For some of the questions, we realised that a lot of the work had already been done for us by Charles Lovitt and the Maths300 team. For example, we had some graphing questions that students had traditionally struggled with and thought we could adapt the Dice Footy lesson to create an authentic context which entailed many rich learning opportunities. We used Dice Footy to LAUNCH the lesson and to EXPLORE the mathematical concepts within the lesson and set NAPLAN questions as the CONSOLIDATING tasks.

Our hope is that by immersing the students in rich lessons with authentic contexts, they will be able to apply their mathematical understandings to the NAPLAN questions without us having to ‘teach to the test’.

Below, are some examples of the lessons we have created and have been modelling and sharing with our colleagues. Please feel free to use them and let us know what impact they had in your classroom.

Sam and Pete

Click the button to get the PDF of the lesson plan.