Creating Equitable Practice in Diverse Classrooms: Developing a Tool to Evaluate Pedagogy

With Australia performing so poorly in terms of equity in mathematical achievement on the PISA scores, there is an increasing recognition for practices that may stem the inequities in education in this country. This paper explores an approach that has been found to be highly successful in the United States and links it to current issues in Australian education. Practical considerations are made regarding the application and implementation of such reform pedagogy when particular nuances of Australian issues are considered. In particular, the development of a tool to evaluate reform pedagogy is the focus of this paper. Increasingly classrooms are becoming more diverse and with such change, new forms of pedagogy are needed to enable the greatest likelihood for success for all students but most particularly for those students who traditionally have been most at risk of not succeeding in school mathematics. Alarmingly, Australia performed well on international comparisons in terms of overall performance but was one of the poorest performing countries in terms of equity (Lokan, Greenwood, & Cresswell, 2001). These authors contend that the outstanding performance of some students overcompensated for the poorer performing students to allow for a good overall outcome. The concern for us is the large gap between those who perform well and those who do not. Such poor performance is not random but strongly aligned with the social, cultural and geographical location of students. In this paper we discuss these highly differentiated performance