British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics
Abstract
In this paper we focus on a collaborative research and development project in which a team consisting of secondary mathematics teachers (newly qualified and experienced), researchers in mathematics education (faculty and doctoral students) and mathematics teacher educators work together on how to achieve balance between creating opportunities for high quality mathematical thinking and attending to classroom management and behaviour issues. To this aim we deploy Haydn’s 10-point scale on the working atmosphere in the classroom. This construct was not devised specifically for the mathematics classroom and our study explores its potentialities for it: we ask whether a scale (Haydn-M) with mathematics specificity can provide meaningful insight into the working atmosphere in the secondary mathematics classroom. In this paper we provide examples suggested by newly qualified teachers in our team of such a mathematically specific use of the scale
