Thread by @ThatMathsMan

Improving Primary Mathematics 🧵

A brief summary of my talk from #mathsconf29

Key questions:
1. What do you want to achieve?
2. What's stopping it from going as well as you'd like?
3. Which systems and structures need to improve?
4. How can this be achieved and sustained?

1a. Before making an improvement plan, we must develop our situational awareness.

Ask yourself & your team:
> Is it clear what we want to achieve in maths?
> Do the actions we take in our maths lessons support our aims?
> How do we know if it's going well?

1b. Almost every school I've worked with uses a maths action plan and monitoring cycle, but these don't always work together to highlight how well we are doing at achieving our main goal: better maths outcomes.

This is often because we do too many things.

1c. Somewhere along the way, we've picked up so many habits, routines, odd resources and worksheets, powerpoints and smart board files that it's hard to describe exactly how we're teaching maths.

This causes a problem. It can be unclear what's working well and what isn't.

1d. So try this. Spell out your intentions and state the actions you do to achieve them.
E.g.
In maths we aim to develop children's conceptual understanding, so we
> Use well-chosen models and images
> Examine examples and non-examples
> Apply our thinking to contextual problems

1e. Soon enough it should be clear which actions are aligned with your aims and which aren't.

When these things are clear, it's easier to discuss and evaluate what you do - where it happens and where it doesn't - and which things could be developed further for greater impact.

2a. When considering what's stopping us from achieving our goals, we have to acknowledge some of the likely contenders:

> Subject content and pedagogical knowledge
> Time and energy spent on superfluous actions
> Buy in and motivation
> Unclear direction

2b. Teaching maths and learning maths is complicated, there's no two ways about it.

As school leaders, one of our jobs is to try and remove barriers for colleges. This might involve helping them to develop their own knowledge, skills and confidence in teaching maths.

2c. As mentioned before, we also need to highlight the useful actions that support us in achieving our aims AND crucially reduce the actions, routines and resources we use that aren't very helpful.

Eliminating ineffective things we do creates more time and capacity. Double win!

2d. Capacity is so important in doing our job well - especially when looking to improve - because we need the time, energy and headspace to think hard about improvement.

If we increase know-how and confidence, and remove obstacles, we are more likely to have the capacity to act.

2e. Capacity, just like time and energy, is limited. So we must make our direction clear.

What can we do to make it obvious what want to achieve?

Over-communicate.

Make it clear why we are working on this, how we are going to act and what we will do to support each other.

3a. I think Yoda said, "there is no try, there is only do or do not."

So what are we going to do? Here's where we need a plan. A plan that focuses on developing our systems for teaching maths to reduce or eliminate our persistent problems and increase our likelihood of success.

3b. At this point it's probably easier to direct you to some top reading, such as:
- The EEF implementation guidance
- James Clear's book Atomic Habits
- Brene Brown's book Dare to Lead

They all talk about improving, by focussing on systems not isolated actions.

3c. For example, we can improve by developing better habits and forming productive routines.

Atomic Habits is about build good habits and stack them together. James Clear talks about making actions easy, desirable & rewarding. It also helps to have a cue to prompt us to act.

3d. Brene Brown's Dare to Lead also supports us with leading with vulnerability including recognising and addressing when things aren't working as well as they could.

I'd always recommend that we make dedicated time to check in with our teams about how it's going.

3e. So, when we have clear systems, with built in check points, it's easier to know if it's working.

E g., daily fluency tasks help children to revisit prior knowledge AND act as an assessment tool. This works v.well if the retrieval questions require contextual problem solving.

4a. So we've got a plan, everyone's got more know-how, more capacity and clarity (aiding buy-in) and we're delivering training to support our intended improvement actions.

It's now that we need to aim for sustainable improvement not just short-term uptake and fleeting success.

4b. In my experience improvement is more likely if:
▪︎ Training breaks professional learning into manageable chunks, enables deliberate practice, is followed shortly after by direct application, and includes peer support
▪︎ Success is observable and can be repeated often

4c. Recommended reading:

The points above about professional learning are well explained in the EEF's professional development guidance report.

The point about maintaining success over a longer period of time is also mentioned in the EEF's implementation guidance report.

4d. The thing I would stress is to avoid trying to implement too many changes at once.

This goes back to capacity, not only for teachers but for leaders supporting colleagues and monitoring how it is going.

And not everything is going to go to plan...

4e. Here I will give a shout out to @lwilliamsjones and the phrase 'responsive fidelity' that he uses when talking about not being inflexible.

Read more in this excellent article here:theheadteacher.com/attainment-and…

5. So finally, when things are off the ground and going well, we want to keep this going and avoid things degrading - even when we've moved on to improvement actions for other subject areas.

The key here is persistence. If something took ages to get going, keep going back to it!

6. Plan to revisit key actions, link key actions together, praise and highlight things that are going well and don't move on too soon.

Check out @bennewmark's blog post about CPD principles and the LPA Standards.

And as @MaryMyatt might say, do fewer things but better!

I think I've reached the limit of how many tweets I can thread, so I will end by sharing an image of my slide of recommended reading from my mathsconf29 workshop.

Thanks to @MaryMyatt @overpractised @DrSamSims @bennewmark @head_teach @PepsMccrea @HFletcherWood @EducEndowFoundn

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