Gallery Walk: an active strategy for solving problems with multiple solutions

Abstract

We are living in a complex and rapidly changing world, in which it will be very difficult to survive without solid knowledge and skills. Thus, the teacher should use strategies, inside and outside the classroom, that meet the different types of thinking displayed by the students, confronting them with tasks, with multiple resolutions, that challenge them to see outside of the box, that motivate them to learn and challenge them to work with each other. On the other hand, many studies recommend that children need to move as an active body incites the brain, making students more involved, which contributes to a better performance. In this sense, preservice and inservice teacher training should promote an insight into the nature of mathematics and its teaching, enabling (future) teachers to have different teaching and learning experiences that they are expected to use with their own students. In this context, the gallery walk (GW) emerges as a strategy to contemplate in classroom practices, which allows students, through collaborative work, to solve problems, present and discuss their resolutions in posters, located around the classroom. This paper presents a qualitative and interpretive study,withan exploratory approach, developed in the context of preservice teacher training for primary school education (6-12 years old), in order to identifythestrategies used by the studentswhen solving problems with multiple solutions, using a GW, as well as characterize their reaction during their involvement in this strategy. The results allowed to identify the strategies used by the participants and to verify the potential of the GW in the involvement in the solutionsand discussions, which proved to be more effective than in more traditional discussions, allowing to increase the repertoire of solving processes of each student.