Deep Mastery

Like almost everyone else in Maths education, I have recently decided to broach the ‘mastery’ word.  It does feel a bit odd to do so, given that it’s been around at least since at least the 60’s, and I’ve never felt a need to use it before – despite having been an advocate of the […]

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Mastery: solving the problem

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 […]

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The problems of problem-solving

In my last blog I set a task, which was to find out and explain what happens in this situation: Given a set of consecutive natural numbers from 1 to 2n, choose any n of them. Arrange these n numbers in ascending order. Next to them, in one-to-one correspondence, arrange the remaining numbers in descending […]

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Finding Nemo and Dissection

I attended both conferences over Easter, ATM and MA.  As OUP was sponsoring the MA conference it was well attended by authors and publishing people. A major theme among secondary teachers in informal discussions at both conferences is whether and how the requirements for problem-solving at GCSE will affect teaching throughout secondary. Another major theme […]

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Chicken or Egg?

This week’s blog is about my efforts to think through the place of problem-solving in teaching, and in relation to the development of conceptual understanding and knowledge of techniques. When the introductory blurb to the national curriculum was written, the first draft put the aims in this order: Fluency Problem-solving Reasoning To us – the […]

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