What makes for successful teaching of mathematics for remote and very remote learners? 
The importance of middle leaders.

Prof Robyn Jorgensen
Background
•	Funded by the ARC through the Discovery Grant Scheme
•	32 case studies of successful remote schools
•	Schools are remote or very remote schools 
•	Schools have at least 80% Indigenous learners
•	“Success” defined through NAPLAN, or by recommendation – schools supply data of their “success”

Project Intent
•	To identify what is working in remote Indigenous mathematics education
•	To develop case studies of successful practice to
–	Celebrate the work of those in the schools
–	Share with other teachers and schools
•	To identify trends (and differences) across schools 
•	To describe, not evaluate, practices used in schools

Context
•	Schools are predominantly staffed by early career teachers – as practitioners as well as leaders
•	There is often a high turnover of teachers
•	Indigenous people are often employed in support roles for the classrooms and school
•	Professional development is difficult to access due to remote location
•	Schools vary in size, type, sector, location
Distribution of Schools
Method
•	Ethnographic case studies
–	Interviews with the leadership team (vision, big picture)
–	Interviews with teaching and support staff (practice)
–	Interviews with community members
–	Observations of lessons
–	Productive pedagogy profiling
–	Collection of school documents
•	Development of individual case studies
–	Uploaded to project website
•	Development of macro analysis of project
–	Nvivo, Leximancer, statistical analysis 
Model
Common Themes
Roles of Middle Leaders
•	Conduit between the vision and leadership team and the enactment of practice at the classroom level.
•	Providing scaffolding for teachers to develop quality learning opportunities for schools
•	Provide senior leadership team with feedback and input into future directions
•	Make sense of the social, cultural and political context of the community in order to create learning opportunities for the Indigenous students
•	Build the skills and knowledge of the local people employed at the school

Characteristics of Middle Leaders
•	Have strong mathematical content knowledge
•	Have strong pedagogical content knowledge
•	Strong knowledge for differentiating learning
•	Require and build trust/respect/autonomy among the staff – leaders and teachers, Aboriginal teacher support staff
Professional Learning
•	The middle leader builds a common and consistent approach to teaching mathematics across the school
–	Inducts staff into the approaches used at the school
–	Provides exemplars of work
–	Provides feedback on teaching
–	Models the approach/es to teaching mathematics
–	Collects and uses student data to inform teaching
–	Supports teachers to understand student data and act on it
–	Develops differentiated teaching to cater for the diversity within a class
–	Works on the development of a consistent approach and plans across the school

Common Themes
Challenges
•	Funding the role
•	Having the right person for the role 
•	Supporting the learning of the Middle Leader – increasing the repertoire of skills of middle leaders
–	Remote support v/s face-to-face support

•	Questions?
http://www.canberra.edu.au/research/faculty-research-centres/stem-education-research-centre/research-projects/remote-numeracy