Paper plate patterns: Pre-school teachers working as a community of practice.

Young children’s patterning, defined as ‘finding a predictable sequence’, has been identified as significant for later mathematical achievement, while proving amenable to amelioration. This study examines how English teachers of three- to five-year-olds engaged in a collaborative project designed to develop their children’s pattern awareness. The teachers and researchers formed a community of practice that enabled the teachers to share and develop their pedagogical practice. This paper illustrates one example of how the teachers worked together to change their practice around border patterns; as their collaboration developed they produced interim stages in the teaching sequence that fostered children’s reasoning.