Pat Lilburn

Pat Lilburn is a mathematics educator and author known for her work on promoting open-ended questioning and mathematical inquiry in elementary classrooms. She coauthored Good Questions for Math Teaching: Why Ask Them and What to Ask, K–6 (later adapted as Good Questions for Math Teaching, K–5: Why Ask Them and What to Ask) with Peter Sullivan, a widely used resource that offers hundreds of open-ended “good questions” across key math topics to help teachers deepen students’ mathematical thinking. Their work builds on earlier Australian editions, including Open-Ended Maths Activities: Using ‘Good’ Questions to Enhance Learning in Mathematics, which similarly focuses on using open-ended problems to enhance learning.

In addition to the Good Questions series, Lilburn coauthored Let’s Talk Math: Encouraging Children to Explore Ideas with Pam Rawson, a book of activities designed to help children talk and write about mathematics, using everyday language to describe mathematical situations and share their reasoning. Her publications collectively emphasize student discourse, open-ended tasks, and the use of rich questions to support conceptual understanding in primary mathematics classrooms.