Oral and mental work in every mathematics lesson

There are very rarely any mathematics lessons where oral and mental work cannot play a significant role in children's learning. Children may be asked to work individually and in silence to practise and consolidate learning but, for most learning, speaking about and listening to mathematics is an essential part of the learning activity. In every mathematics lesson some discussion and mental work will be required to stimulate and challenge children's thinking. The oral and mental 'starter' to the mathematics lesson may be quite short; a brief rehearsal of some number facts, part of an ongoing consolidation activity over a week or within a unit of work. Of course this sort of activity need not be confined to the starter or even to the mathematics lesson. For example, as children move about the room and clear away, the rehearsal activity can be reintroduced and, during those bits of time during the day when children queue up or get ready for some event, they might be asked to recite a number rhyme or tables facts.

In some mathematics lessons the oral and mental 'starter' may take longer, for example, when used to refresh past learning and stimulate thinking as a precursor to some new topic or to develop ideas that require some key knowledge and skills. When a new topic is being introduced, linking the oral and mental 'starter' to the main part of the lesson helps to sustain the focus of the learning for the children so they do not jump from one topic to another.

Planning oral and mental work into a lesson involves deciding when it is appropriate and for what purpose. It may draw on carefully planned, direct or prompting questions to support discussion with children and between children. It might be an assessment of all or some children's learning, that has taken place during or before the lesson, where the planning involves identifying more probing questions that seek to elicit what is limiting progress or to establish that learning has been secured. It might be that the children's learning is ready to be moved on and the questions and accompanying dialogue are intended to promote explanation or reasoning, to stimulate new lines of enquiry, to evaluate alternative strategies or to propose hypotheses to test further.

The use of such prompting, probing and promoting questioning is a key feature of good teaching and learning. Questioning can be used to stimulate and sustain effective oral and mental work and the questions might be the children's own, as well as those posed by the teacher. The planned questions might be closed questions, for direct assessment purposes, or open questions, to stimulate dialogue or thinking. More often they are a mix of the two in response to purpose and need. When asked a question in the mathematics lesson, children need time and space to think about their responses. Planning how to facilitate this is important. Modelling it with another adult, or in a group of children, and allocating talk partners are helpful strategies, where children are given the opportunity to talk to their partners before they share their responses more widely.

Building some opportunity into the lesson for children to engage in oral work and dialogue is important. The choice of when and how requires professional and informed decisions that take account of the topic, children's progress and the teaching and learning strategies being deployed and promoted. It is important, too, that the mental work in which children engage during the lesson is acknowledged so that the children recognise how important this is within their learning. Mental work involves rehearsal and recall, but also draws in all the six Rs. It, too, can be stimulated by good questioning that requires children to use and apply the mathematics they have learned to explain, interpret, argue, reason and select information. For example, the question may involve deciding whether or not a statement about a set of numbers or shapes is true, interpreting the accuracy of some measurements against a scale, presenting an explanation following time spent discussing a method of calculation, or reasoning that a quadrilateral may have two pairs of equal sides but not be a rectangle.