Since work plans are a common way to organise students’ work in the school as well as at home (Bergem & Dalland, 2010; Klette et al., 2008), the phenomenon deserves further comment. Legally, every student has the right to be taught according to his/her needs. In mixed ability groups this seems almost impossible, and one assumes that the practice with the work plans started in order to meet those needs (section 2.2.1).
In lower grades the teacher, responsible for a class, normally asks all the other class teachers to deliver the learning goals planned to be reached within the different subjects for the next week(s). Included are assigned tasks in each subject. Then plans for all subjects are collected and present- ed in one overarching plan. Parents and students welcome such plans, in that they then have an overview of what is to be learned and done in the planned period. In upper secondary schools those plans are normally giv- en for each subject.
In the L97 curriculum it was emphasised that students themselves should take responsibility for own learning. In praxis, this responsibility often turned out to be a responsibility to do the assigned work within the period, no matter when and where. In the PISA+ study (Bergem &
Dalland, 2010), the interviewed students told about their decisions: some chose to do all tasks as soon as possible in order to relax or to do other things, other students that they do it the last day in the period covered by the plan. It illustrates that the students often worked with tasks not related to the theoretical focus for the lesson. The students told that they contin- ued to work with the plan where they had left it. In most classes students sat together in pairs or in groups, however, there was little or no coopera- tion. The reason was according to the students that they were not working with the same tasks.
In addition, the researchers (ibid) found that teachers gave little or no response to assignments. When students had worked with different prob- lems during a lesson, it was not easy for teachers to draw conclusions or to lead discussions about the mathematical topic in focus for the lesson. This is in accordance with the findings from surveys in the main PISA study; that students were often left alone with their work, and that the fo- cus was the doing, not so much the metacognitive activity of reflection and thereby learning.
In sum, it is reported that students did not cooperate so much during seat work, since they worked at different rates on their plans, and that in- dividual work on textbook tasks dominated the work in the classroom. Research reported that the atmosphere in the classrooms was characterised by mutual respect and acceptance. However, through the work plans the
teachers abstained from or lost the possibilities to steer the work in the classroom and to have classroom discussions and to reflect on mutual tasks (Bergem & Dalland, 2010; Klette, 2003; Klette, et al., 2008).
2.7 The task discourse and the didactical contract
In mathematics classrooms the individual work on textbook tasks led Mel- lin-Olsen (1996) to come up with the notion ‘task discourse’. In inter- views with teachers in primary and lower secondary school he found that in schools there could be said to be an institutionalised discourse going on. In mathematics this discourse is characterised or steered by the math- ematical tasks, and therefore he introduced the notion ‘task discourse’ as a metaphor for the process of teaching and learning. A mathematical task has a start and an end. And this end is often to be checked by solutions in answer books. He described how mathematical tasks are coming in a se- quence, one after another, and it continues until the last task is solved, it may be within a lesson, in home work, on the work plan, or in the book. Mellin-Olsen (ibid) found that teachers used words connected to a journey as metaphor for the teaching and learning processes. There is a goal for this journey; the exam, and the teachers have the role as drivers or coach- men. Their responsibility is to bring the passengers, the students, safe to the goal. Students’ responsibility is to keep on and not fall off. Students range themselves according to how far they have come in the textbook. Hundeland (2010) found that the same metaphors were frequently used among teachers in his study. Mellin-Olsen (1996) emphasised that this institutionalised task discourse might constrain teachers’ way of acting.
Mellin-Olsen also showed how stops on the journey implied possibili- ties for students and teachers to reflect, discuss and negotiate before the journey through the mathematical tasks continued.
The teachers in both studies (Hundeland, 2010; Mellin-Olsen, 1996) refer to the dilemma of going through the syllabus and at the same time supporting each student, who is some place in this sequence of mathemat- ical tasks. As mentioned in the foregoing section, one way to deal with the problem has been the introduction of work planswhich have made the important stops on ‘the journey’ more problematic since the students are not working with the same tasks.
The above mentioned studies (ibid) are only case studies with few teachers involved, however, as a mathematics teacher, this task discourse is not unfamiliar to me. The task discourse is closely related to the didac- tical contract described by Brousseau (1997). This contract comprises the tacit and implicit rules regulating the relations between the teacher and the students in a class.
Blomhøj (1994) claims that traditional mathematics classrooms are characterised by some common features that are part of the didactical con- tract. These features are: The teacher has to carefully demonstrate meth- ods and algorithms presented in the textbook. Student are only offered tasks that can be solved using learned methods and algorithms. A task is solved and finished when its questions are answered. The questions can be answered shortly by a number or by few words. Students’ learning is as- sessed on the basis of their ability to solve such tasks only. Students’ roles are to do their best to solve assigned tasks.
Further, Blomhøj (ibid) claims that students’ learning is influenced by the type of contract that prevails in the classroom. The contract described above might lead students’ motivation to be to fulfill their part of the con- tract, not to learn mathematics in its full sense. The mathematics has a tendency to be closely bound to the context of the mathematics classroom. Students, however, are mostly satisfied with the situation. Blomhøj, as also Brousseau (1997), claims that such a contract must be broken if stu- dents are going to learn mathematics properly.