Investigative approaches to teaching mathematics and ‘getting through the curriculum’: The example of pendulums

This paper describes an investigation of the relationship between the length of a pendulum and its period (time for one complete swing) conducted as part of a professional learning program with ten teachers in a Year 9–12 school attempting to teach the entire curriculum using project-based learning1. As described by Beswick, Callingham and Muir (2012) none of teachers at the school had studied mathematics beyond secondary school. Nevertheless, they were reasonably adept at identifying at least some of the mathematics that could be taught using a particular context although they struggled to know how to engage students with the mathematics (Beswick et al., 2012). They were also concerned about whether it would be possible to cover the entire mathematics curriculum using only projects.