ABSTRACT
It’s not often that I do demonstration lessons, as I feel it’s important to know the children you’re working with and the sort of classroom culture that they are used to working within. The established culture may not be conducive to the way I want to work with the children and my expectations for how they could work together. Working cooperatively is a skill that needs to be honed over time and if children’s mathematical experiences have been largely based around working individually, then my lessons are less likely to be models of the sort of practice I aspire to, more likely to be disasters and reinforce views of ‘see, I always knew these kids can’t work together’.
