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�Session 4 – Helping pupils master important concepts – Part 1

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Session overview

This session will focus on:

Anticipating common misconceptions
Identifying subject knowledge gaps
Tackling common misconceptions

Approximate session length: 45 minutes

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Helping pupils master important concepts

‘The most useful forms of representation of those ideas, the most powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations—in a word, the most useful ways of representing and formulating the subject that make it comprehensible to others.’

(Ball and others, 2008)

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Anticipating common misconceptions

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Anticipating common misconceptions

“The most effective teachers have deep knowledge of the subjects they teach… As well as a strong understanding of the material being taught, teachers must also understand the ways students think about the content, be able to evaluate the thinking behind students’ own methods and identify students’ common misconceptions.”

(Coe and others, 2014, page 2)

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Tackling common misconceptions

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Tackling common misconceptions

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Tackling common misconceptions

In order to prevent this misconception from developing, it’s important to support and develop pupils’ understanding of number using concrete objects or representation when first introducing pupils to the strategy of partitioning to add. There are several ways you could do this, but one way is to use a part-whole model.

The ‘whole’ – 28 – is represented at the top and the ‘parts’ are represented in the circles attached to the whole. Pupils could be provided with blank models to fill out or partially completed ones like the one above. They can be given Dienes blocks or place value counters to explore partitioning the numbers and identifying relationships between them.

As you can see this teaching strategy has been carefully thought about and planned into the scheme of work because the misconception is a common one for pupils.

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Reflection

Reflect on the following questions and then record your response.

Review the concepts in your sequence of work.

What common misconceptions are pupils likely to have?
What would help pupils to develop their thinking and to master the concepts?
Can you identify any analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations or demonstrations that could help?