Christian Bokhove Evidence explained Imagine you are designing a textbook and only at the end you decide to evaluate its effectiveness. This would be a risky thing to do, as it would mean making an enormous investment, without any inkling of ‘whether it works’. This would not be money well spent. During the whole design […]
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By Vanessa Pittard, former Assistant Director at the DfE No single person can take credit for Singapore’s success in the teaching of mathematics, but if I could nominate someone, it would be Berinderjeet Kaur, Professor of Mathematics and Mathematics Education at Singapore’s National Institute of Education. Along with others, I was lucky enough to hear […]
Read more “In order for teachers to develop the confidence to deliver a mastery curriculum we need to empower them to take risks in the classroom.” Rebecca Hamburger explains how to go from teacher to master: All too often when I am delivering whole school CPD, I ask the question: “Who loves maths?” and only a few […]
Read more Vanessa Pittard shares expert advice on how to build firm foundations with mastery. I’d like to suggest that one of the benefits of mastery is the avoidance of misery. I’ll focus on primary maths, but what I write here applies as much at KS4/GCSE as to Key Stage 2. What’s the point of introducing mastery […]
Read moreAs the revision period for the Key Stage 2 SATs is now well underway, Year 6 teacher Sarah Burnham offers a few helpful tips to prepare for the maths tests. Making every minute count Practicing maths facts little and often can be really beneficial in developing fluency. A daily ten minutes focusing on the four […]
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Comprehension can be a thorny topic. It is defined as the ability to read text, process it, and understand its meaning and involves complex cognitive processes. Problems or weaknesses in any of these elements can be a significant barrier to the reader’s understanding. The job of the teacher is to identify which elements their pupils […]
Read more Ofsted has put a fair amount of effort into debunking common myths about inspection. Its response to these, set out on gov.uk [1] and reinforced in the inspection handbook [2] , should offer some comfort to schools choosing to adopt teaching for mastery in mathematics. For example, teachers using textbooks as the basis for lesson planning will […]
Read more Rudyard Kipling’s The Ballad of East and West contains the famous opening line: Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. I’ve heard this message echoed in a variety of forms over recent years by educators who are wary, and sometimes sceptical, of the value of mathematics teaching methods […]
Read moreIn a recent blog post , I talked about the way in which the much-praised Asian education systems are rethinking their ‘grades are everything’ approach to education. It is encouraging to see that they are beginning to realise the importance of a more holistic, child-friendly approach, though I worry that for some years we in the UK […]
Read more At Coldfall Primary School, we recently adopted the Inspire Maths programme and teachers are working hard to bring the ‘Singapore’ or ‘mastery’ approach into their lessons. But what does teaching for mastery look like in the Singapore classroom? How do teachers use textbooks and how do they ensure that children are appropriately challenged and supported? […]
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