heart of heartlands lessons

For our new year 7 cohort, we are delivering a new scheme of work called Mathematics Mastery. In many ways it does not offer anything new to the core principles behind good teaching, of ensuring depth of understanding, and progress for all students. However, there are a lot of misconceptions around what Mastery is, and what it is not. Within our schemes of work Mastery follows five Big Ideas: Coherence, Representation, Variation, Fluency, and Mathematical Thinking. There is a strong focus on conceptual understanding, building problem solving skills and resilience, and the key language being consistently used both by teachers and learners. All of these elements have relevance across the national curriculum and Mastery has really taken hold (particularly in Maths) in many primary schools. It has enabled developments in our teaching, and drawn our attention to bodies of research some of us had not been aware of.

Misconceptions around Mastery as a discipline are common place. One misunderstanding is that you do not move on until every single student understands a concept at the same level.This is not the case. However a great deal of time is indeed given to any concept, providing the weaker students with the capacity to consolidate the idea. The more able are given stretch questions which deepen (rather than widen) their understanding, meaning students still have a range of levels of comprehension, but all can access the concept. Another falsity around Mastery is that topics will never be revisited. Obviously, Mastery differs from a traditional spiral curriculum in the way content is delivered, but key concepts are constantly built upon and revisited. For example, fractions are covered in Year 7; it should not be assumed that it will not be covered again until Year 11, especially as Maths is a subject in which connections are constantly made.

Moving away from the theory, I’ll introduce some of the strategies we use with our programme. The most valuable aspect of Mastery (for me) is that we spend an hour every week talking exclusively about the upcoming lessons. We collaboratively plan, with different teachers being assigned different units, and then critique one another’s lessons ensuring we’re all delivering the same high-quality content. It also provides us with the opportunity to discuss in-depth misconceptions, and the language we choose to use, which is vital. By doing the Maths we expect our students to do, it’s much easier to draw out the key concept as well as what mistakes they are most likely to make. It may seem obvious to practise the questions we set for our students, but it’s easy for this to be pushed down the to-do list or just pass a cursory glance over the worksheet we’ve found, rather than delving into the complexities that a simple question can offer, but the value is not to be underrated. In practising questions, we also rehearse the explanations we will perform to our learners. This allows us to draw out the most appropriate language for ensuring depth of understanding, consistency, and eliminating misconceptions that the wrong word could encourage.

In the Year 7 Maths classrooms (aside from set 1, and 5) students are mixed ability which for many of us is a new concept. The research is overwhelmingly in its favour, however, and we have experienced the benefits first hand, behind many other subject areas which already adopt it! Mastery encourages a huge amount of class and paired discussions in which mixed ability allows students to hear from their (potentially more able) peers and build on one another’s answers. The nature of our questioning to students does not allow for any answer less than perfect. This is rarely received straight away, but by probing student responses and asking them to go deeper, the answers we interrogate from them are more coherent and accurate. Often several students will repeat a very similar answer until we hear the key language or subtle clarification, but by doing this consistently, the students are not disengaged but determined to communicate effectively.

Finally, our persistent questioning and conversations with learners are supported through visuals. Sometimes these come from the presentations we show, or sometimes through manipulatives.When initially looking at the equipment Maths Mastery wanted us to use, I foresaw chaos and a behavioural management nightmare. In practice however, their value is phenomenal for weak and able students alike. Visuals have an obvious use for EAL students who are less able to communicate verbally, but enable all pupils to support their answers and represent problems in unfamiliar circumstances. They are not always valuable but they do allow for a depth of comprehension, sometimes not feasible through numbers alone.

Maths Mastery is an important and exciting change for our department, but most of the 5 Big Ideas can be applied across the curriculum. It will be interesting to see Mathematics changing nationally as more schools adopt a Mastery approach .