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Public writing in lessons (board, mini-white boards, etc.)

Most teachers avoided presenting too much writing, because PLAS are highly likely to have weak literacy skills.

Objectives: the schools did not follow current practices of having written lesson objectives for every lesson, except one school while being inspected. Some teachers wrote key questions and vocabulary for lessons. Nearly all teachers would tell students what the lesson was about and how this fitted with other work.

What it means to be a mathematician: several teachers displayed various words, lists and activity descriptions of what doing mathematics is about. At SP all teachers displayed a list of characteristics of mathematical work (see being a mathematician)

Illustrations from media: several teachers displayed pictures from internet or other media to illustrate uses or situations that related to a topic, or that could be analysed mathematically.

Dynamic software: students come to the board to move or draw things

Worked examples

What students say: complete list or selected list

Teacher's examples: are these carefully written to refer to later? What stays on the board for people to look at and continue to learn from?

Students' examples: are these chosen by who volunteers or by teacher selecting a useful range; are these displayed for whole class on the main board, or on an array of mini-whiteboards?

Things to compare, classify, label, describe

Layouts to use/imitate: layouts which structure thinking, support algorithms, or make comparison between similar items more obvious.

Writing frames/structures

Ideas represented in several different ways, e.g. picture/words/algebra, or graph/data/equation

Joint tasks to which lots of people contribute

Students' work in progress on noticeboard

Structures prepared by teacher to write over, e.g. graphs axes, tables, grids