Maths: Teaching for Mastery
Maths is a fundamental part of everyday life. It is critical to science, technology and engineering and a necessity for employability. Our high-quality maths education at Danetree provides a foundation for understanding the world, an ability to reason and encourages a sense of enjoyment and curiosity about the subject. Teaching for Mastery offers all pupils the opportunity to access the full maths curriculum: building self-confidence and resilience in every child regardless of their starting point.
Our Vision and Rationale
At Danetree, our primary aim for Mathematics is to equip children with the skills essential to enhance life opportunities. A secure knowledge and understanding of Mathematics will enable children to access and make links to the rest of the curriculum. We want children to be able to enjoy and explore the beauty of Mathematics, developing an awe and wonder for this subject which will inspire them to ask questions, make connections and spot patterns. Children will learn Mathematics through a ‘Teaching for Mastery’ approach which is underpinned by five ‘Big Ideas’. Opportunities will be given for children to apply their learning of concepts to a range of sophisticated reasoning problems where learning becomes more relevant in real life contexts. In order to embed learning and master the curriculum, learners are challenged through breadth and depth of concepts. Number fluency is a core principle, ensuring that children have solid foundations which are built on year by year. We expect children to be able to retrieve prior learning regularly and select the most efficient method to solve a problem. Through exposure to rich language and the use of stem sentences, we want our learners to reason and explain their mathematical thinking. We aim to build resilience in learning by helping our learners to be independent and have strategies to approach unknown problems as well as reflect and learn from mistakes.
National Curriculum Aims
The National Curriculum for Mathematics aims to ensure that all pupils:
- become fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that pupils develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately.
- reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language
- can solve problems by applying their mathematics to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions.
Teaching for Mastery
Many schools use a ‘Teaching for Mastery’ approach as the foundation for their Maths curriculum. We began to implement this way of teaching in 2016 and have observed the positive impact this approach has on pupil confidence, enjoyment and attainment. In its essence, Teaching for Mastery means ‘mastering’ the Maths curriculum. The aim is for pupils to have a deep, sustained knowledge and understanding of Mathematical concepts and to be able to apply their learning with ease. Many of the ideas used in Teaching for Mastery originate from principles used in Shanghai teaching – a city whose PISA results are among the highest in the World. In Teaching for Mastery schools, the aim is that all children can achieve and that all children have the same opportunities within a lesson. There are several ‘big ideas’ which combined, make up the Teaching for Mastery approach.
The principles of teaching for Mastery (NCETM)
- Teaching for mastery rejects the idea that a large proportion of people 'just can't do maths'.
- All pupils are encouraged by the belief that by working hard at maths they can succeed.
- Pupils are taught through whole-class interactive teaching, where the focus is on all pupils working together on the same lesson content at the same time, as happens in Shanghai and several other regions that teach maths successfully. This ensures the pupil is ready to move forward with the whole class in the next lesson.
- Lesson design identifies the new mathematics that is to be taught, the key points, the difficult points and a carefully sequenced journey through the learning. In a typical lesson, pupils sit facing the teacher and the teacher leads back and forth interaction, including questioning, short tasks, explanation, demonstration and discussion.
- Procedural fluency and conceptual understanding are developed in tandem because each supports the development of the other.
- It is recognised that practice is a vital part of learning, but the practice used is intelligent practice that both reinforces pupils' procedural fluency and develops their conceptual understanding.
- Significant time is spent developing deep knowledge of the key ideas that are needed to underpin future learning. The structure and connections within mathematics are emphasised, so that pupils' develop deep learning that can be sustained.
- Key facts such as multiplication tables and addition facts within 10 are learnt to automaticity to avoid cognitive overload in the working memory and enable pupils to focus on new concepts.
Downloads
Maths-Progression-of-Knowledge-and-Skills-Website.pdf
