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Malmö Högskolan, Sweden, has been building its teacher training courses around Learning to Work Like a Mathematician for almost two decades. The university has a task centre kit, a set of Poly Plugs, heaps of other materials and is a member of both Calculating Changes and Maths300. The staff weave these resources through their pre-service and inservice training programs and we have been invited to deliver a small part of the program each April over recent years.

This year Saied Alavei participated in a workshop for teachers of Years 7 - 9. The session led Saied to explore Mathematics Centre more deeply and as a result he cut up the wood from his kayak building to make a class set of Sphinx pieces. Now he, and his Year 6 children, are hooked. Read Saied's story, which has several great photos, in the Link List below.

At the end of the first two days of six on Working Like a Mathematician in Number & Pattern for teachers of the Catholic Education Office Canberra Goulburn, teachers were asked to draw a face, and add a speech bubble if they wished, to indicate how they felt about this first phase of a program which will continue until November. These sample sketches give an idea of the value of the investment the diocese is making in its teachers.

These artistic expressions were backed up by other teachers with comments such as the following in response to How might these days influence your teaching?:

• Support students to share knowledge/ teach each other
• Lots of hands on ideas
• This has given me the tools and ideas to make everything hands-on first
• More investigation
• Exploring and letting the teaching go where the kids are going
• Model and encourage multiple ways of getting to an answer
• Asking valuable questions can unlock a simple activity
• Make me rethink my teaching strategies and goal setting
• More questioning
• Lots of class discussion and recording
• This experience has offered an amazing way to transform teaching mathematics in a 'hands on' way. I can't wait to use it!

For the third year, this six day progam is being provided by CEO Canberra Goulburn. By the end of 2013 almost every primary and secondary school in the diocese will have been involved. In their respective numeracy leadership roles Gina Galluzzo, Madonna Pianegonda, Fiona Pettit and Kel Hathaway in his technology role, work with the schools between segments of the course to encourage and support school trialling. This education team, the Diocesean leadership team and the school administrations are committed to developing a consistent, classroom-based framework for change around Working Like A Mathematician and providing key resources to support children to learn this way.

Within a week of the April meeting, Deborah Heath, St. Joseph's, Grenfell, was introducing the work of a mathematician to her Year 1 students. The children were asked to draw what they thought a mathematician looks like. Six year old Archie drew this:

Deborah writes: When I got back from the WLAM course, I had a discussion with my class about working like a mathematician. We discussed things like recording and checking maths work. I told them the story about how long it took to discover the solution to Fermat's Theorem and how the people working on the theorem kept records and checked their work. After that I asked the children to draw what they thought a mathematician looked like, what equipment they would use and I asked them to write a sentence about what mathematicians do. Most of them, amazingly, came up with the problem solving idea.

It is a privilege to be working with CEO Canberra Goulburn in this adventure to improve mathematics learning across the system. If your system, region, cluster or school (anywhere in the world) is interested in constructing a similar program for curriculum shift please explore our Professional Development options through the Link List below.