nine Archives - Itechment

maths mastery

Adopting a maths mastery approach is easier and more beneficial than you might expect, says this head of maths and Maths Hub mastery lead

I’m head of maths in a very large inner-city primary. We have 745 children, all of whom have English as an additional language. We’re not short of challenges to tackle. So why did we choose to introduce maths mastery?

Some people still believe that teaching for mastery is about learning by rote: dull, and difficult to teach. But it isn’t. Some believe that shifting to this approach means a significant overhaul of the school. It doesn’t.

Mastery has been an amazing success at our school and helped to improve our SATs results.

So how do you go about introducing teaching for mastery in your school and what are the potential pitfalls? Here are nine essentials you need to consider.

1. Don’t be half-hearted about maths mastery

I really immersed myself in teaching for mastery. Once I’d had a training session, I was pretty evangelical on the subject. I dragged the deputy head from my school and a colleague from another school to do some training, too. Teaching for mastery needs to be a whole-school approach and one every teacher is enthusiastic about.

2. Get the funding right – even though money is scarce

Engaging with the NCETM (National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics) and our local Maths Hub enabled us to secure funding from a research project. This allowed us to introduce teaching for mastery in one class and for two teachers to be trained. But I didn’t want just one class in the Year 1 group adopting teaching for mastery. So we decided to find the money to introduce the programme in all three classes and for all the teachers in the year to be trained. Our teachers returned to school from the training sessions saying, ‘Why haven’t we always taught like this?’

3. Training is key if maths mastery is to be successful

One of my roles at the Maths Hub is to support teachers in my region to introduce teaching for mastery in other schools. Each of the 35 maths hubs now has eight Mastery Specialist Teachers, all with the remit of supporting schools as they adopt teaching for mastery. I get contacted every week by schools that have pretty much thrown mastery textbooks at teachers and thought that would do the trick. But if you don’t understand the books, you can’t teach the method.

You need to adopt a really strategic and well thought-out approach; if you don’t understand the pedagogy and have secure subject knowledge, teaching for mastery won’t have an impact on attainment. The starting point has got to be the children.

Unlike conventional approaches to maths, with teaching for mastery you don’t label children as less/more able to learn maths. We have a really firm belief that all our children can do maths. Some might struggle, but we know that they can all get there in the end. The whole-class approach calls for a really big change in attitude and it’s essential to understand the concept behind the pedagogy.

4. Take it slowly

We introduced the mastery textbooks gradually. We chose the Maths – No Problem! series, which has been chosen by the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics and the Department for Education for use in the maths hub programme.

5. Lesson structure is key

The lesson structure is very important: it starts with an anchor task, a very practical activity all children can access. The anchor task might involve characters walking along the road picking flowers. The children will be asked how many flowers have been picked.

6. Timing is everything: split lessons

We do two half-hour lessons with a break in the middle. There’s lots of discussion, with ideas ping-ponging back and forth. Children will do some maths and then teachers will question them on it and talk about it. Then we have a break. Children come to the board and explain their working before and after the break to show what they’ve learned. Every time a lesson stops, we can pick up the children who are struggling and provide additional help.

7. Make it practical

Using carefully chosen practical resources, such as base ten materials or counters reveal the mathematical concepts to children and the workbooks help with practice and are particularly helpful with children who may be struggling.

8. Watch for pitfalls

We get inundated with emails from teachers – up to 20 a day - asking for advice, training and follow-up training. There’s no doubt that the main hurdle that teaching for mastery has to overcome is teachers’ anxiety about teaching maths. Secure subject knowledge is required if teaching for mastery is to succeed. If you don’t have maths subject knowledge you wouldn’t necessarily know what to do with the textbook. I hear horror stories about schools using three or four different text books in a lesson in order to achieve differentiation – but the key principle of teaching for mastery is a whole-class approach! Another common mistake is to use the textbooks but have no practical resources.

We find that one lesson can take three or four days. We don’t move on until all the children have really ‘got it’. But we hear from schools that try to finish a lesson in 15-20 minutes!

9. Get parents on board

It’s a challenge for teachers to get their heads around the mastery method, so imagine how the parents feel! It’s really important to make sure they are kept informed about the style of maths teaching at their children’s school. Every term we invite parents to come into the school for a workshop where they work alongside their children during a lesson. We also run additional bespoke workshops for parents of children who are struggling. We don’t want parents to teach their children maths at home – we believe teaching is our job! The workshops are to ensure that parents are not scared by the maths and don’t feel anxious.

One of the great things about teaching for mastery is its emphasis on communication and the way the children are encouraged to talk about what they’re doing. We don’t accept one-word answers from children in our classes; they have to speak in complete sentences. We find that this increased fluency in spoken language has a knock-on effect on literacy. And as far as maths is concerned, we’ve moved from a SATs score from somewhere in the 60s to 99 per cent in KS2 at level 4 and 100 per cent at KS1 in 2015. Teaching for mastery really does add up.

[Source:- tes]

We have more evidence about what works in the classroom than ever before, but how much of that knowledge is in the hands of teachers? Educationalist Dylan Wiliam outlines the essential information he wishes he’d had when he started out in schools – gleaned from some of the world’s top academics

I never trained as a teacher. I had applied for a place on a PGCE at the University of London, but after a couple of months of waiting, and with a pile of debt and nowhere to live, I took the first job I was offered. That just happened to be in a private, residential sixth-form college – what was, at the time, known as a “crammer”.

I learned very little about the realities of teaching large groups of students. But in retrospect, I can see that as an untrained teacher I was very lucky in being able to work with small groups of highly motivated students – in other words, to discover how students learn in something close to ideal conditions.

The following year, I got my first real teaching job. It was at Christopher Wren School, a boys’ school on the White City Estate in west London. Again, I was lucky, but for a very different reason.

“The Wren”, as it was known at the time, was what we would today call “challenging”. I started work the same morning as an economics teacher who walked off-site at morning break and was never seen again.

I was lucky because just about every teacher struggled to keep order and, more importantly, just about every teacher was willing to acknowledge the difficulties they had just getting through the day.

‘Tough’ lessons for student teachers

A dozen years later, when I was running a PGCE course, I found that this was not an isolated example. It turned out that student teachers who needed additional teaching practice did better when placed at a “tough” school than an “easy” school, because the staff tended to be more supportive when everyone had difficulties.

My teaching improved rapidly at the Wren and a lot of what I learned could probably be learned only through actual practice. However, I know some things now that it would have been really useful to be told by someone when I started teaching.

Some of these are things that were not known 40 years ago. Some are things that I might have learned about had I done a PGCE (although I doubt it). And some are things that I knew at a cerebral level but didn’t incorporate into my practice (the knowing-doing gap).

So here is my list of the nine things I wish I had known when I started teaching. TES subscribers can read the list in full here.

Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you careThis phrase is generally attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, although it does not appear in any of his writings or recorded speeches. Whatever the source, it captures a key point for teaching. Teaching is about relationships, and these relationships are best when they involve mutual respect.
When I ran a PGCE, many of the student teachers told me that they were worried about whethertheir pupils would respect them. I generally replied that I was more worried about whether they would respect their pupils. When teachers start from the basic assumption that the pupils in their class are people – sometimes little people, to be sure, but people, with all the human rights that we accord to adults – then good things tend to follow.
This idea was beautifully encapsulated by Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot, who, when asked to define good teaching, said it was “ideas as conveyed through relationships” (Moyers, 1989).
Here are the next 8, which you can read in detail in this week’s issue of TES:
Learning is a change in long-term memory
Memory is the residue of thought
Learning requires forgetting
If you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up someplace else
The answers of confident students are a bad guide to what the rest of the class is thinking
The only thing that matters about feedback is what students do with it
Effective group work requires individual accountability
Students have deep insights into their own learning

Dylan Wiliam is emeritus professor of educational assessment at University College London and the author of several books on education