seven.” (T) One student answered “Yes” and another:”is it wrong?” (T) The students
requested a new sheet of graph paper for drawing but still did not appear to think of using
the coordinate system. Osvald then gave a further suggestion: as he said later, “…, a new key
word. I gave a key word, I gave x and y to another group.” (T)
We draw attention to three significantly related issues here:
& Teachers’ struggle in the planning meeting to be satisfied with the wording of the task to
“draw number pairs”;
& Teachers’ desire not to give the game away by telling too much;
& The students’ difficulties in interpreting the instruction to “draw” number pairs and
teachers’ corresponding difficulty in deciding how to respond.
3.4 An inquiry cycle—review of the classroom activity
A review meeting between didacticians Eli and Leo and the three teachers took place in an
evening, about 2 weeks after the lessons, at Eli’s home. It was hoped the location would be
more conducive to informal discussion than in a school or university environment. Leo and
Liv had selected short video episodes from each of the lessons, and these were viewed and
discussed. In the analysis, we are interested in:
& teachers’ reflections on the value of the tasks in generating students’ attention to
concepts in linear functions;
& teachers’ recognition of aspects of their own learning; and
& new ways of doing and/or seeing matters that seemed to emerge from the overall
experience of designing and using the tasks.
The word “inquiry” was not used at all during the meeting. However, the nature of the
tasks, the engagement of teachers in the design and use of new tasks, and the joint reflection
on events all speak to the inquiry nature of the activity engaged. We (authors) see inquiry
here in the students’ mathematical activity with the tasks, in teachers’ exploration into
teaching and in our combined reflections into what occurred, how we thought about it and
what we (teachers and didacticians) learned.
Early in the viewing, teachers commented on the activity (and learning) of the students.
Students seemed not to understand what the task was actually asking them to do: Perhaps it
was a more open task than they had experienced before; perhaps, they were used to having
more direct instruction. For example:
[Students] are not used to work in this way and they get frustrated …
Many students are not curious enough—they don’t see the point [of the task]
It was as if the teachers needed to apologise for their students who seemed not to be doing
what the teachers hoped (or what teachers thought the didacticians hoped).
One of the episodes chosen showed the students in Osvald’s class struggling with the
instruction to draw number pairs. Students did not know what to do with this instruction.
Osvald said he thought that asking them to draw would take them immediately to drawing a
graph, so he was surprised that despite much discussion, they were unable to see what to do.
It was Osvald’s comment to another group, mentioning x and y (axes), which led to students’
recognition that they could draw a graph. Eli asked in what way the original question (in
Card 1) might have been changed to make this less of a stumbling block. They discussed
alternative words like “mark” or “plot”.