Digging deeper: Guidance for teaching confident maths learners
26 June 2025
A key aspect of the refreshed curriculum is planning for students to experience learning of their year level content from the teaching sequence. The planning guidance in the updated learning area asks that teachers plan for inclusive teaching and learning at all times. You should consider offering multiple methods of participation to all students so that they can engage in a variety of learning experiences and have multiple ways to show their progress.
Maths and statistics Year 0-8 Planning Guidance (Tāhūrangi)
The planning guidance also suggests that teachers can extend students who have developed deep conceptual understanding and procedural fluency for their year. This can be done by using challenging rich tasks and problem solving that allow the students to apply their understanding to unfamiliar situations. This encourages the students to develop further generalisations and to strengthen their mathematical and statistical communication and reasoning.
Further guidance for teaching confident maths students has been added to the Tāhūrangi Maths Hub and is listed below under Classroom resources. This guidance includes classroom strategies and example tasks that can be used to challenge and extend confident students in maths.
This guidance reframes the way we think about success for confident students. For students who are confident in maths, success is the ability to:
- Transfer knowledge to new and unfamiliar contexts
- Tackle problems using multiple representations
- Communicate reasoning clearly
- Make meaningful mathematical connections
These are the hallmarks of mathematical proficiency – and they often get missed if students move too fast through concepts. Students who can demonstrate these skills are exceeding year level expectations.
Instead of focusing on moving quickly to higher year level material, try thinking about building well-rounded, long-lasting capability – by digging deeper, not racing ahead.
Classroom resources
We’ve developed the following resources, to support you with extending confident students in maths, all of which can be found on the Tāhūrangi Maths Hub:
Digging deeper: Guidance for teaching confident students in maths
When you have students who grasp year-level content quickly, it’s natural to want to push them ahead — and your instincts to keep them challenged are right. But speed doesn’t always mean conceptual understanding. In fact, the best way to stretch and grow confident learners is to offer more depth, not just more content.
Deep learning builds flexible, creative, and independent mathematical thinkers — traits that last well beyond the current year level.
This guide is here to help you do just that — with practical strategies, examples, and tools you can use right away.
Digging deeper: Guide for teaching confident maths students (Tāhūrangi)
Extension guidance for Ministry-funded Maths resources
Guidance on extension opportunities are available through each of the four suppliers of Ministry-funded maths resources. You can use this guidance to help plan extension opportunities for confident maths learners, within their year level.
These resources are available on Tāhūrangi, on the same page where you order Ministry-funded resources.
Ordering Ministry-funded maths resources - extension opportunities (Tāhūrangi)
Toolkit for Gifted Learners
A new toolkit focussed on supporting gifted learners has been created by Learning Support Coordinators (LSCs) for LSCs, teachers and other support staff. This resource addresses common myths and misconceptions about gifted education. It also provides practical strategies for creating an inclusive and nurturing learning environment with a range of videos, frameworks and templates.
Supporting Teachers of Gifted Learners – A Toolkit for LSCs
Posters
The following posters will support learning for all students. We encourage you to print and display the posters in your classroom and have included supporting bullet points below to support you with learner discussions.
Maths Talk poster: a resource to support rich mathematical communication
- Mathematical and statistical communication is an important component of the updated maths and stats learning area.
- It is important to engage all students with mathematics and statistics communication.
- Students communicate to develop ideas and share their learning in maths.
- Good prompts and questions from the teacher, and from other students, help us activate students’ learning and support them to contribute.
The Maths Talk poster displays prompts to be used in mathematical discussions.
These prompts:
- improve the quality of discussions
- provide scaffolds for all students, giving them a way into any discussion
- can be used by students and teachers
They help students to actively listen and think about discussions and the ideas of others.
Poster: Maths talk - supporting rich mathematical communication (Tāhūrangi)
Change your words, change your mindset poster: a resource to support positive mindsets
- An important component of the updated maths and stats learning area is helping students to develop positive relationships with maths.
- Feeling open minded and positive makes supports learning and leads to greater confidence and success.
- For positive relationships with maths, the words students use about their learning affect their behaviours.
- This poster can be used in the classroom to remind students that mistakes can be useful learning, and that spending time and effort is part of the process.
Poster: Change your words and change your mindset (Tāhūrangi)