Posters: a tool to foster visual and communication skills through mathematical challenging tasks using a gallery walk

Abstract

The society is evolving posing continuous challenges that demand the development of a specific set of skills and knowledge of its citizens. These core competencies involve problem solving, creativity, communication, critical thinking, collaboration, that must be incorporated in the teachers’ practice and developed by students. So, teachers must orchestrate productive discussions around the solution of tasks that allow multiple solutions (including visual ones). Students don’t all have the same types of thinking, some are more analytical, others prefer visual approaches. This implies the use of strategies that meet the different types of thinking displayed by the students, confronting them with tasks that challenge them to see outside of the box. We introduced posters to foster students’ learning as a tool that enable visualization and stimulate communication, through a Gallery Walk (GW), as an active learning instructional strategy. The GW allows students to solve a task, collaboratively, given them the opportunity to present, discuss and assess solutions in a poster placed around the classroom, in a similar perspective to that used by artists when they expose their works in a gallery. In this paper we share an ongoing study carried out with future elementary teachers (6-12 years old) where a GW was implemented that aims to characterize the strategies used by the students (future teachers) when solving tasks with multiple solutions, in particular to identify the visual solutions, and to characterize the reaction during their engagement in this GW strategy. An exploratory qualitative approach was adopted, collecting data through written productions (solutions, posters, comments to the posters), observations and a written report. The results showed that students enjoyed this experience, allowed to identify that students privileged visuals solutions of the tasks, and posters are a potential tool for assessment, through peer feedback, and allowed to verify the potentialities of the GW for a more effective teaching and learning of mathematics.