Free mastery maths resources from White Rose Maths Hub

Carlsberg don’t make teaching schools, but if they did, I’m beginning to suspect that Trinity Academy in Halifax is what they’d come up with. Back in May at a conference I heard vice principal, Tony Staneff, explaining their mastery-led assessment system and I was impressed. Today I have received from the Maths Hub at the school, their excellent resources for organising and planning a primary maths curriculum based on the mastery principles.

I wrote back in April 2014 about how I was using a blocked approach to teaching mathematics, and plenty of people have asked me since then for my resources, or for long-term overviews. I’ve offered what I can, but the White Rose Maths Hub at Trinity have offered far more: a complete long-term scheme of learning for KS1 & 2, supported by excellent additional resources. And what’s more, it’s all free!

Firstly, let me say – as I’ve said before – that mastery has become something of a controversial and confused term. However, in this case they’ve got it spot on: mastery is for everyone, ensuring that all secure the key concepts and skills to allow them to explore things in greater depth.

So what’s available?

For each year group, they have put together an overview document setting out the suggested teaching blocks. This is broadly similar to the approach I took in my previous blog, but with much greater clarity, including the National Curriculum objectives to be covered in each phase. So far, useful indeed, but what really sets this resource apart is the supporting exemplification, which provide examples of the sorts of questions that support fluency, reasoning and problem-solving.

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The resources are provided for every unit in every year group in a manner that helps teachers who feel confident with maths – and maths mastery – but will be a real boon to teachers new to the idea who will value the guidance on pitch and direction.

Opening each resource is a really useful guide to the key ideas behind mastery maths, including the all important use of the concrete-pictorial-abstract model, and some frequently-asked questions. It should help to explain the key messages for teachers new to mastery or who have heard mixed explanations about what it involves. It also pinpoints other useful resources from the NCETM.

And as if that weren’t enough… (I know, I’m beginning to sound like a cheesy advert), the maths hub is also working on assessment resources to accompany the scheme. These are due over the remainder of the term and should be a real bonus in supporting teachers to make accurate assessments that will really support teaching and learning.

***Update – October 2016***
The work has continued. The hub has now produced schemes and assessment resources for every term in every KS1-2 year group, and even schemes for mixed-age classes in primary!

But enough… request the resources for yourself and get started on that journey!

http://whiterosemathshub.co.uk/free-learning-schemes/

 

Curriculum Design 3: A common vocabulary, or a common misunderstanding?

In the last of my series of 3 posts on the trials of curriculum design, I want to look at something that seems to me to be a growing problem in our system.

Firstly, we have the challenge of trying to get teachers to engage in curriculum design in a way that has just never been possible before, particularly in primary schools. For near 20 years, the agenda in primaries has been driven by frameworks and strategies: the big picture was drawn for you – teachers were expected to do the painting by numbers bit. Now we have a much more blank canvas, and that’s a frightening place to be.

But the new concern I have is the transferability of what we know from ‘research’ into classroom practice and school planning – particularly that surrounding the growing vocabulary of curriculum design.

It’s great that research can now tell us more about what works, and even better that there are more and more channels for sharing that with teachers. The report before Christmas from the Sutton trust: ‘What makes great teaching?‘ was a prime example. But what did we learn from it?

The report tells us that spacing study leads to greater long-term retention; that interleaving leads to better transfer of skills than blocking; that generating responses is more effective than studying; and, that pedagogical content knowledge can lead to higher gains. We know from other research that overlearning can be effective The problem with all these gems of wisdom is in the interpretation.

After all, what does it mean to ‘space’ study? Does it apply only to revising before an exam? Should our curriculum be built around spacing units of work? Or individual lessons? Should a maths teacher teach addition on ten consecutive Mondays, rather than over a fortnight? Or teach a weekly block every half-term? When does spacing simply become time to forget?

What of interleaving? The Sutton Trust report tells us:

Learning in a single block can create better immediate performance and higher confidence, but interleaving with other tasks or topics leads to better long-term retention and transfer of skills.

But again – what constitutes interleaving? Does the fact that my maths lessons are interleaved with English, Science and PE count? Or should I be mixing up the topics I teach by changing each week in maths? Or every day? And if blocking’s no good, then is my mastery model up the spout? And what, for that matter, do we mean by mastery anyway? For some it is about everyone moving on together; for others the key point is about over-learning and fluency; or is it about applied learning in complex contexts?

This causes me to reflect on the ‘spiral curriculum’. We often think of the spiral as being coming back to things termly, but in some cases are people using it to mean revisiting every few weeks? Or did the term really represent the difference between the UK model of teaching across the maths areas every year, compared to the case in some states where Year 9 is for, say, Algebra, and Year 10 is for Geometry?

The questions are endless. How do we measure ‘overlearning’? Is it enough to do 5 more calculations once you seem to be good at column addition? Or must it be 50? Or a week of lessons?

I raise all of these problems not merely as theory, but practice. I have grappled with many of these ideas over the past couple of years, and still struggle. I have gone to some lengths to work on longer blocks of learning as part of my mastery model, yet at the back of mind I always have the niggling doubt about interleaving. Is spaced practice enough to counter those concerns? Or are others looking at  my model thinking that I’ve done exactly what the Sutton Trust advise against in “blocking learning”?

The trouble with these theoretical questions is the way they play out in classrooms, staff meetings and with the powers that be. The DfE talks of a mastery curriculum – and then confuses the term by using it to mean high-attaining in its performance descriptors. The EEF evidence shows that feedback is effective, so Ofsted inspectors demand to see more marking, despite the fact that the EEF report also says that feedback should be sparing, and need not necessarily be directed at the student!

I find myself confused. And I consider myself to be one of the more engaged in the debates in the profession. The increasing use of research and evidence in education should be welcome, but I’m just not convinced it’s ripe for its audience yet.  It seems that we are often using a common vocabulary… to talk about different things.

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Related blog recommendation:

Joe Kirby – who is always knowledgeable on matters of cognitive science and its impact in the classroom  – does a great job of explaining many of the research findings in his article: Why don’t students remember what they’ve learned?

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Other posts in this series:

Curriculum Design 1: Do we even need to design the curriculum?

Curriculum Design 2: Spaced practice vs spiral curriculum?

Doing Less, But Better: KS2 Writing

Rob Smith (@redgierob) of Literacy Shed fame today posted a simple enough question on Twitter:

How often do you children write more than a paragraph or 2 in KS2?

— Rob Smith (@redgierob) September 21, 2014

As is so often the way with such simple questions, a can of worms was soon sprung open. This is not the first time that Rob and I have had to agree to disagree, and the pattern is fairly similar. I’m generally of the view that less is more. Less movement, less change, less jumping about, and much more time spent on a single focus.

For that reason, when talking about the teaching of Writing, I am a fan of looking at longer blocks on a common theme. I’ve written before about a mastery approach, and here I want to expand on how that might look for a single unit.

The norm for the past few years in primary schools has been to teach a new text type each week. Rob even suggests getting 3 ‘longer’ pieces of writing a week from Y4+ children. (To be fair, he defines these as being an A4 side, not necessarily a full ‘extended’ write). Now, I’ve no particular aversion to extended writing, but I do worry that we can begin to value quantity over quality, and our need for quantity can lead to a race through the text types again.

I’ve taken a typical weekly plan from a TES download (no names, to protect the innocent!) and it follows broadly the following structure:

1. Identify features/layout of a newspaper
2. Review and write headlines
3. Difference between fact and opinion
4. Brief intro on connectives before starting draft
5. Complete writing (focus on openers?)

Now, none of these are particularly problematic features of the sequence, but look at what’s missing: were is the discussion of punctuating speech? Where is the examination of how to write an effective closing (surely one of the most challenging parts of article writing?) How much do children understand about how to embed quotations in a text?

I would much rather complete a unit like this over a couple of weeks, focussing on various elements in the build-up before completing a single extended piece at the end of the unit. It would seem reasonable to start with the unpicking of the various elements of a news article first (Alan Peat has some good resources on this). Then we might examine in close detail how the 5Ws are included in the lead of the article, and practise this skill with some familiar contexts. Developing the main body is often a challenge for students, since they feel they’ve covered everything in the lead, so focussing on what content makes it interesting, and how it might be included comes next. This would seem a sensible time to practise using a variety of subordinate clauses, including embedded clauses, to ‘cram’ as much detail as possible into the article, since this is a journalistic norm. By now we’d already be approaching the end of the first week, and I’d be tempted to try another shorter piece of writing – perhaps a couple of paragraphs – to practise these skills.

The following week might begin with some sort of activity that provides the content for newspaper writing. In one example I’ve taught, we had a hot-seating type affair where the students interviewed an ‘astronaut’ recently returned from space. Thus, a lesson was spent on looking at open and closed questioning, and note-taking to capture responses, and a later lesson on the task of the press conference itself. Now we felt ready to begin to prepare the articles. We had our content ready, quotations on hand, and a good background of the structure and features of newspapers. A lesson mid-week spent on drafting the articles gives an opportunity for self-, peer- and/or teacher assessment, before building on feedback to make improvements. Often this is the stage at which children realise that their newspapers articles simply ‘end’, and so it’s a good opportunity to focus on how we can build cohesion across the text by linking the beginning and end, or by reflecting/considering the future. Or it might become clear that the cohesion throughout the text is lacking in many children’s work, because of a lack of understanding of, or use of, cohesive ties/discursive markers, thus providing an opportunity to re-teach this and for it to be used instantly in a context.

Of course, the exact content you’d need throughout the unit would vary by the group and its previous experience. You might need a focus on the use of consistent/relevant tense (a tricky one in newspapers, actually), or on selecting appropriate vocabulary, or specific punctuation elements, or organising paragraphs, or all manner of other skills that are required to produce an even half-decent attempt at a complex piece of writing. None of those can be taught simply through practising the main writing. They require active teaching, and meaningful practice before they can reliably be used. The reality is that no piece of writing is easy to produce at any standard of quality without a close examination and practice of its constituent parts.

Thus, my approach might – on a very generic level – look something more like:

1. Unpick features of the text
2. Teach an aspect of structure then draft an opening
3. Teach an aspect of grammar and practise out of context
4. Use the grammar aspect in a context not related to the final piece
5. Practise a brief version of the text type, to use as a feedback opportunity
6. Use a reading/S&L activity to prepare for writing (e.g. Talk for Writing)
7. Gather the necessary information for the content of the text
8. Draft the text
9. Teach an aspect picked up from the first drafts
10. Use the first draft to mark and then edit/improve

It’s obviously not fixed like that, and would vary depending on the type of writing you’re doing and the context, but it allows a good deal more consolidation of the key skills that build into writing the main text, without requiring many long pieces of writing. It breaks down the skills into more manageable chunks so that they can begin to be mastered before being applied. Of course, mastery may well be a long way off, but by spending a little more time on core aspects, hopefully the chance that they might be retained is increased!

I fear that all the time we focus on quantity and production of writing, we run the risk of repeating the problems we already face in maths, where children march through content and somehow reach secondary school without securing the basics of things like number bonds.

As usual, I find myself repeating my mantra: Do less, but better.

A mastery model for Writing: moving away from the text type treadmill

Are we deceiving ourselves about cohesion?
(Cartoon from xkcd.com/724)

I wrote back in the autumn of 2013 about how I found the endless march through text types to be ineffective in really securing children’s skills in Writing. I have spoken at several events since about how our perception of a joined-up curriculum in primary schools may not be conveyed as well as we like to the children we teach. We often build our writing tasks around a common topic or text and describe this as building a coherent curriculum, but too often the cohesion is in the topic, and not in the skill of writing. I have likened this in the past to trying to build a wall with bricks simply by dropping lots of randomly-shaped bricks and hoping they’ll fall into place.

This year, I have tried to improve on this model by bringing greater coherence to the curriculum for Writing. That doesn’t necessarily mean moving away from thematic teaching, nor necessarily moving away from using the text types. However, my intention has been to adopt some of the principles of the mastery model that I discussed in my original blog: focussing on fewer aspects of writing for a greater length of time.

Initially, this was based on identifying common strands through the units we were intending to teach (see details in first blog). Later, however, I began to adapt the text types we were using to ensure that we spent longer focussing on common strands. The idea here was to group the text types together slightly to ensure that we spend longer focussing on common features rather than racing through the various types hoping that some of the content we threw at the children would stick!

Our initial model ended up looking something like this:

Click to download PDF version

Over the course of the year we continued our usual units of study, with writing tasks adapted to focus on some common themes. Generally I would say that this has been a successful approach. I’m not convinced that it made any substantial difference to our progress in Writing this year, but I do think that the children have been – and will be – able to retain more of their knowledge of each of the genres, and so will be able to draw upon that knowledge more effectively in the future. One of my concerns of the race through the text types has been the lack of retention of the main features, meaning that almost every unit of work becomes a revision unit rather than developing further skill, at first at least.

As I approach the new year, however, I think there is more that could be done to develop this cohesion within and across year groups. Traditionally many schools have repeated the structure of the old Literacy framework by trying to get through many text types in each year, re-visiting regularly. My preference is to group the text types such that over the period of 6 weeks there are opportunities to learn and employ some of the key features. This has led me to a model based very loosely on the GCSE writing triplets:

Click to download PDF

I realise that this clear division into fiction and non-fiction blocks will fill some teachers with dread. Many teachers have a preference for one strand or the other, and so find the through of a whole half-term without their favoured type quite daunting. I can understand this, but our focus has to be on providing the most effective curriculum design to help our students to retain the key elements of learning.

The advantages of this approach are hopefully evident at least in part. By focussing on some common areas over a half-term, there are opportunities for students to experience, employ and adapt the various features and techniques being taught. Significantly, it will be possible to share with parents more detail of what is being covered in Writing, since the focus will be narrower. This also allows us to use target-setting more effectively, as students are able to learn from early pieces in the half-term and apply the target in the next piece. This replaces a system where too often children (particularly in upper KS2) have writing targets which are not particularly relevant to the text types/genres being taught.

Obviously this is just a broad example which doesn’t link directly to any topics or themes that are being taught. As with all models, it wouldn’t be possibly to transfer it wholesale from school to school because it would work best when properly aligned with the wider curriculum. However, hopefully it may provide an interesting discussion point for schools thinking about tackling the content of the new curriculum?

Comments welcomed!

Mastery Maths in KS2

Around this time last year I started reading about the work of the Ark group and Mathematics Mastery. So it was that as I moved to KS2 in September, I set about leading my year team – and an adjoining one – on a mastery maths journey. We’ve not reached the end-point yet, but it seems to be a hot topic at the moment, and following on from Bruno Reddy’s great blog about how he’d tackled mastery maths at Secondary, I thought it would be worth sharing what we’d done in KS2.

My initial thinking was led by what I’d read about the Ark scheme, and then built on by what I read in Dan Willingham’s excellent “Why don’t students like school?” about how children learn. It was soon put into context by my early experience in KS2. Having moved from KS3 I had previously taught maths sets; now I would be teaching a mixed ability group at a very different level. In KS3 I had previously moved towards what I’d considered to be longer blocks of two or sometimes three weeks on a unit. That had worked quite well for the high ability groups, but it had become clear for others it had still been too much too fast. I hadn’t previously been dealing with the need to teach and learn tables, or introduce area, but it felt like this was a good way of getting it right!

As the new curriculum was on the horizon, it was a useful starting point, and seemed to fit rather well with the mastery approach anyway. I began by mapping out broad units, using a model based very loosely on the Mathematics Mastery secondary curriculum map. It has’t held fast all year, but it provided a perfectly good starting point.

Year 5 Mastery Overview draft

It meant that the first half term of the academic year was spent almost exclusively on place value and addition/subtraction. Within that we drew in elements which related to those skills. So, it seemed a sensible time to tackle in aspects like calculating perimeter, or finding missing angles on a straight line. Interestingly, there are plenty of similarities between our plan and that of KSA, particularly in that first term. See also what it says about separating minimally-different concepts (such as area & perimeter!)

In the Spring term, we took the step of spending a whole half-term on fractions. I’ll be honest, I was nervous about it. It’s never been my favourite area to teach, and rarely is it students favourite area to study. However, the system seems to have paid off. Knowing that we had weeks to spend on it meant that we weren’t afraid to take the time to secure the basics before launching into the higher level skills suitable to their age. And we weren’t abandoning it for another topic just as they were getting into things.

What’s more, I drew on the things I’d seen of the Singapore bar method to really secure understanding of fractional calculations. We’d been using thinkingblocks.com in school as a general problem-solving tool, but it seems that for fractions this approach really comes into its own. It allowed the children clearly to visualise the problems we were tackling, and to secure a much clearer understanding of why mathematical approaches worked. I cannot speak highly enough of the bar model in the context of mastery!

We haven’t been working on this approach for anything like as long as Bruno Reddy’s school, but initial results look positive. We’ve trialled the approach in Years 4 and 5 and seen a substantial improvement in ability to master the key methods, as well as spending more time to drive a focus on number bonds and tables. It seems that the approach will likely be even more successful in data terms once the new KS2 tests begin with the additional arithmetic paper!

Although it’s early days for us, some of the most significant evidence of success has come from the teams teaching the curriculum. Not all were sold on the idea at the beginning, but it has garnered the support and enthusiasm of those involved because it’s working! You can see it in the progress made by groups who traditionally do well, but perhaps more importantly in the successes of those learners who might traditionally have found making progress more challenging!

There’s still plenty to iron out and tweaks to be made over the coming years as different cohorts come up with different experiences. I still don’t think I’ve spent enough time and effort on securing number bond and tables knowledge – despite finding myself in every week’s work saying at some point “Now, can you see why it helps to know your tables?”. I still think we can do more to incorporate the important stages of concrete and representational development before the abstract. It’s not perfect yet.

But I can no longer imagine teaching any other way. Five years ago I was arguing that we needed to move away from week-long planning for maths; now I’d argue that anything less than six weeks is probably doing our students a disservice!

Ask me next summer how it’s paying off in terms of KS2 results!

One size does not fit all

Teacher Demands Less Learning With More Tests And No Differentiation
Failures Held Back In Summer Schools

It would make for a nonsense headline, wouldn’t it? There’s pretty widespread agreement in the education world that English schools are subjected to greater volumes of testing than some other nations, including some high-performing ones, so who on earth would suggest that to get better education we need to teach less, but to test more? And then to punish those who don’t meet the new demands?

At first reading, if you were minded to see such headlines in your mind, you could perceive exactly that viewpoint from Joe Kirby‘s excellent blog on mastery learning and assessment this morning. After all, he explicitly says that “All pupils are expected to master all the concepts”, and that “if you have not understood […] you would stay in for summer school”. He specifically argues for ‘teaching to the test’ when he says “create a rigorous assessment, then teach to meet its standards”, and worse, he says there should be frequent testing, and we will be reduced to the use of mundane multiple choice tests. It’s true, that at first reading you could easily convince yourself that Gradgrindian was an understatement and producing automaton students was the way of the future.

Except, of course, if you really read what it says.

I’ve been toying with a mastery model of teaching this term in KS2. It’s at a very embryonic stage and is very limited in scope (i.e. one year group, in one school, led by one person), but the realisations I have reached are already quite significant to how I plan to move forward. And much of what Joe writes about, I recognise quite clearly.

Less Learning?

Firstly, on the matter of ‘less learning’. This seems to be one of the least controversial proposals, and of course it isn’t really about less learning at all, but less teaching and less pointless repetition. Primary teachers will often comment (quite rightly in some cases) about how much time is wasted in Y7 in secondary schools repeating content that has already been taught. However, it’s important that we remember that what has been taught is not what has been learned. We are all familiar with the blank looks of children who claim never to have met a skill or concept before. Sometimes we wonder what the previous teacher or school has been doing; other times we know the children are wrong because it was we who taught it the first time! The reality is that children don’t learn everything we teach, and the more we try to teach, the smaller the percentage they are going to be able to learn. The much-loved analogy of lighting a fire against filling an empty pail is poignant here: piling on the wood won’t make for a good fire if the kindling isn’t alight, any more than splashing vat-loads of water into a pail will necessarily fill it. We need to find the right amount of content to teach to match the learning capability of human minds.

What this means for mastery learning is the teacher(s) taking control of the content and creating the most effective pathway through it to ensure that learning can be guided, built upon, and – most importantly – retained. There are plenty of teachers who recognise that cramming for the tests serves only the purpose of scores on the tests. To create good learning we need to teach less, but better.

More Tests?

That leads us nicely onto the issue of tests. On Twitter today several teachers – with absolutely the right intentions – have queried yet another increase in tests. In an already well-tested system, surely creating more tests would be a bad idea?

Firstly, let me correct my use of “well-tested”. We may well have a highly-tested system in some respects, but that doesn’t mean we do it well. At primary level, the QCA optional tests are great if you want to allocate scores and levels. They’re pretty useless as a formative teaching tool, though. What Joe and others are suggesting is not just more levelled assessments to create scores, but more useful and focussed assessment.

In my own class this year that has meant a mixed economy of testing, all of which I think is entirely appropriate for primary schools. Which brings me to the title of the blog: one size does not fit all. While the overall theory of mastery can be relevant from Early Years to University, the application of it will vary massively. In the Early Years classroom teachers will doubtless encourage children to write their name frequently in many contexts. EY specialists know that they need to provide these opportunities for practice and mastery. When teaching other letter forms they know that once isn’t enough, and that they need to re-visit them all. We can call that repeated practice testing. It doesn’t look like a secondary-school exam, but it serves a purpose to assess what a child can do and to know when they are ready to move on.

I have used a variety of testing forms this year. At half-term I did give my students a paper test, with questions and boxes for answers. But not just a standardised test paper to get a score. I selected and created questions which matched the content I had taught. I wanted to see which students could still use column addition outside of the context of a two-week block on addition. I also wanted to know which of them really understood why we have phases of the moon. I don’t think a paper test actually does any damage, but I do think that to be of any use the test needs to match the curriculum and the students, not just the national benchmarks.

Alongside that single assessment period, I’ve used a host of other techniques. Occasionally I have set a starter in a maths lesson which has essentially been 5 questions based on content that I’ve taught in the past weeks. That’s a technique that is not uncommon in primary schools. We don’t usually call it a test (I called it a “review” with my children), but that’s essentially what it is.

I’ve also set some additional multiple choice question tests via our learning platform. 10 questions per week, entirely optional at the moment for students, but I’m minded to move to making that one of the weekly homework tasks. I have not made the tests particularly demanding, I’ve called them “quizzes” and I’ve praised those who have taken them (they do so because they enjoy them!). They are, in effect, tests which have given the students an opportunity to revisit their learning, to freshen in their minds a particular concept, and to use the structure of multiple choice to review learning in a low-stakes environment.

What Joe suggests as frequent testing may sound abhorrent if your first thought is to imagine a termly QCA optional paper. But if you tried to use a QCA optional to assess mastery learning, then you’ve entirely missed the point. Frequent testing is not about frequent scoring, or ranking, or catching out; it’s about frequent formative assessment. And in some cases, not even that. Just the process of having to recall information for the test will be beneficial to students’ learning.

Scrap differentiation / Hold back students

Another aspect of mastery which can easily be misunderstood is the expectation that all students which reach a threshold. We have become accustomed over the years to a largely differentiated curriculum  (with setting encouraged by central government), and at first glance the mastery model could appear to undo this entirely.

I have written previously about the scourge that is differentiation in our schools. I genuinely believe that some uses of differentiation are positively harmful to students. Low expectations of under-achieving students can serve to exacerbate their struggles. Of course, there are also excellent examples of a well-differentiated curriculum helping to close the gap between lower and higher achievers. That is exactly what mastery learning calls for. It is intended to highlight those who are at risk of not meeting the required thresholds, and then –  most importantly – putting the support in place that is necessary to ensure that they do. Of course, how that support arises will be a challenge for schools to master. But frequent low-stakes testing has got to be a better method of identifying those who need additional support sooner, rather than waiting for an end-of-year – or worse, end-of-key-stage – test result to highlight names to be added to an SEN register.

The call for summer schools may sound cruel, but actually could form part of a serious and robust system for supporting students. If we got differentiation and support right from Early Years on, then fewer children would find themselves in need of giant leaps of support later on.

There are many who praise the Finnish model of education, and surely we can agree that one of its strengths is its excellent provision for students who begin to fall behind. Something like a quarter of students receive intervention at some point. And it isn’t true that there are no tests in Finland; only that there are hardly any standardised tests. Teachers still write tests, based on their curricula, and still assess students. How else could such an intensive support system work?

Testing doesn’t need to be nasty, and it doesn’t need even to be “tests” as we might first imagine it. All that Joe – and others who support the mastery model – are calling for is regular, well-planned, purposeful assessments. Of course, in a secondary school with varied teaching groups and limited timetabled hours for each subjects, straightforward pencil-and-paper assessments can be a really useful model. And frankly, secondary school children won’t be damaged by it.

Naturally, for those of us in primary, we need to adapt these ideas to fit our context. We have a massive advantage in only having to think about 30 children a year. We have the advantage of upwards of 20 hours per week to get to know them. We may not need testing in the same manner as the secondary RE teacher with 600 students. But that doesn’t mean that because the word ‘test’ is used that the whole idea is inherently evil.

One size does not fit all… but then, nobody said it should.

Why is Mastery just for Maths?

The trouble with failing to lay proper foundations.

With the new National Curriculum, and a whole host of new players in the field of education, it is certainly a time of innovation of sorts in our schools. I have been interested in the work being done by Ark and others looking at mastery in mathematics. It seems that their approach – based in some part on that used in Singapore and like places – is built on the premise of covering fewer topics in greater depth each year, with the intention that over the course of a child’s education they receive a thorough education in each stage of the process.^[1]

This strikes me as sensible. Too often I have taught children at KS3 who have raced through the curriculum, picking up bits of skills, but for whom the basics of number knowledge and calculation are still insecure. The comparison to the end-moments of the game, Jenga, is too often fitting: students who lack the secure base on which to build their higher knowledge soon come crashing down.

It has meant that this year I am approaching my teaching of maths with something of a mastery model.

But I’ve got to thinking. Why does it need only to apply to maths?

I’ve also, this week, seen students in my class complete an unaided writing task in which it seems they ignored everything they have been taught this half term and just jotted down notes at random. After some initial frustration (as is common), I soon realised that the fault here was mine (as is also common).

I have taught them a good deal over the past few weeks in terms of writing skills. But I’m not convinced I’ve given them enough time to really securely practise and secure their use of those skills. And so, just like the kids who can’t do their tables in Y10, I’ve got students who haven’t applied even half of what they’ve learned.

I suspect that my model of teaching is not unlike that of many other primary teachers. We’ve looked at a particular genre, linked to a theme we’re studying, over a couple of weeks, and I’ve used that vehicle to teach some appropriate structures and techniques. However, I fear that the downfall of the process has been the movement on to another genre and another set of techniques for the next fortnight. Indeed, I know many schools where each block lasts a week before moving on.

What I’ve begun to consider is not yet a fully-formed idea, so excuse my thinking ‘out loud’, but I’m wondering now if maybe I need to re-think how I tackle these things. What if next half term I identified just a handful of core skills that I wanted to really allow the children to explore and embed. My initial thoughts are to select just three issues from text, sentence and word level (à la Literacy Hour 1998)

So, for example, I might decide that next half term I’m going to focus on:

• Developing fuller/more detailed paragraphs
• Variety in sentence length
• Use of verbs

Those key ideas can be woven through the themes and genres we’re looking at in a variety of ways, but importantly, in ways which complement one another, and which allow the children to become more proficient at each of them, rather than flitting from one idea to the next. They’re sufficiently broad to allow for a sensible amount of development and differentiation, while still providing a sense of connected learning and practice for all.

My units planned so far for next half are likely to be ghost story-writing, creating a narrative from a comic strip, and then some form of descriptive writing about the locality. Each of those would easily lend itself to all three of those skills – with some particularly strong in different areas – and so perhaps by the time we reached Christmas I might have some students who were really secure in some of the elements of that, rather than having had a taster of lots of techniques, few of which have stuck.

Like I said, it’s not a fully-formed idea yet, so I’d be exceptionally glad of any thoughts and experiences from others who have tried similar things – or think it best avoided. All comments welcome!

[1] If you aren’t already familiar with the Ark Mastery Project, it’s worth taking a look at their website for a brief insight: http://www.mathematicsmastery.org/