Investigating teachers' formulations of learning objectives and introductory approaches in teaching mathematics andstatistics

Paying attention to the planning of lessons represents a crucial teaching task. This paper analyses teachers' framing of lesson objectives and their descriptions of how they would introduce particular mathematics topics. Connections between the objectives and the instructional strategies employed, were also studied. The study involved 75 South African mathematics teachers who were teaching Grades 4-12, in the KwaZulu-Natal Province. These teachers completed a questionnaire asking them to reflect upon and describe their teaching practices with respect to a chosen topic. The findings revealed that setting up clear lesson objectives is not easily done with only 64.0% of the participants providing clear learning objectives. The findings also showed that teachers preferred introducing the topics using teacher-centred methods. It was also found that for more than half of the teachers, there were clear connections between lesson objectives and the introduction of the topic in the classroom whereas less than a quarter of them made connections between lesson objectives and teaching and assessment strategies. Teachers, as important drivers of education, should prioritize the setting of clear objectives around which coherent lessons can be developed so that their teaching can be more effective.