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 […]
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In November I was in the UK delivering talks on the Singapore approach to teaching secondary mathematics. While I’ve been delighted to share some of the details of our system during these talks, the real pleasure for me has been to interact with UK teachers and to learn how things are done over here. From […]
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 […]
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First, a bit of theory about learning. In 1980, Shlomo Vinner, an Israeli mathematics educator, coined the terms ‘concept image’ and ‘concept definition’ to highlight the difference between what students actually know about a concept and the formal meaning of the concept. David Tall, an English mathematician and educator, is credited with promulgating the term […]
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