Abstract:

The society is evolving posing continuous challenges that demand the development of a specific set of skills and knowledge. These core competencies, that involve problem solving, creativity, communication, critical thinking, collaboration, must be incorporated in the teachers’ practice and developed by students. Mathematics is a collaborative pursuit, strongly dependent on the teacher and the tasks proposed, privileging mathematical challenging tasks. A challenging task, may be defined as a question posed intentionally to attract students to attempt a resolution. Teachers must orchestrate productive discussions around the resolution of tasks that allow multiple solutions (including visual ones). In particular we are interested in visualization because it plays an important cognitive role in the teaching and learning of mathematics, as an aid to thinking, a means of communicating and a useful tool in problem solving. Students don’t all have the same types of thinking, some are more analytical, others prefer visual approaches. This implies the use of strategies that meet the different types of thinking displayed by the students, confronting them with tasks that challenge them to see outside of the box. We introduced posters to foster students’ learning and promote a positive attitude, as tools that enable visualization, stimulate communication and develop students' skills for presenting knowledge in novel and effective ways; using a Gallery Walk (GW), as an active learning instructional strategy. The GW allows students to solve a task, collaboratively, in small groups, and gives them the opportunity to present, discuss and assess solutions in a poster placed around the classroom, in a similar perspective to that used by artists when they expose their works in a gallery. Finally, a collective discussion is held. It also provides the opportunity for students to contact with different ideas and solutions, getting written/oral feedback, which can extend their repertoire of strategies. As teachers’ educators, we should promote opportunities for future teachers to have different experiences similar to the ones that is expected they use with their own students. With this paper we share an ongoing study carried out with future elementary teachers (6-12 years old) where a GW walk was implemented. We intended to characterize the contribution of a GW to the development of mathematics knowledge on challenging tasks with multiple-solutions and to the fostering of productive communication; the role of visualization on the different solutions and in poster presentations; identify the privileged solutions (analytical or visual); as well as the reaction to the GW. An exploratory qualitative approach was adopted, collecting data through written productions (tasks and comments) and observations along the GW. The results allowed to identify the strategies used, mainly visual, and posters were a successful tool for assessment, through peer feedback, and allowed to verify the potentialities of the GW for a more effective teaching of mathematics.

Keywords:

Posters, Gallery walk, visualization, Multiple-solution tasks, Pre-service teacher education.