Supporting students: a teacher trainer perspective

By Julia Smith
Published 11 March 2022

Julia reflects on her time at school and how the lessons she learned are particularly relevant to students this year.

That experience was a salutary lesson to me, and a lesson in how not to teach. It’s an experience that I apply to my work and talk about often when training teachers, but it’s also one that’s particularly important to remember now, when trying to re-engage students with maths after the disruption caused by the pandemic.

Lost connection

I think back to my own maths teachers (or rather the back of their heads) and how I was left feeling so disenchanted with maths – I wonder whether students during the pandemic will think back to an intermittent Wi-Fi connection and home distractions in the same way.

‘I hate maths!’ is a cry that we often hear from students who struggle and one we’re likely to hear more since the pandemic. We can’t let these comments go. They give us a great opportunity to open a dialogue about why a student feels this way so we can try to change their thinking.

Making maths real to learners is key

Our students need to understand, now more than ever, that having a good maths GCSE grade will open doors they don’t even know are shut yet. The independent charity National Numeracy tell us from their research that good maths skills will earn you more money, give you better opportunities, lead to better health and your children will also be better educated themselves when the time comes. They also have some great clips on YouTube, from a range of celebrity ambassadors, selling positive messages about maths. We need to be ready with this information and other well thought out responses to ‘I hate maths!’.

It’s also important to make sure you, as a teacher, are feeling engaged with maths. Find an engaging teacher to observe or find an inspirational maths teacher on Twitter to follow. Keep learning, keep reading, keep listening to ideas and keep the momentum going. Enthusiasm is infectious, and we’ll need bundles of it this year.

The only way to get good at maths, is to do maths

Maths is a practical subject, it has to be experienced. You can’t take notes, you can’t watch a video and then just get it, you can’t just highlight key pieces of information: you have to do it. Doing regular, daily maths helps to build good maths habits but many students will have fallen out of these habits in the last year in particular. We need to encourage students to get back into good habits and to practise until they can’t get it wrong, not just until they get it right.

Little and often

Spaced and interleaved practice shows us how effective it is to keep revisiting questions, over time, to cement skills into long-term memory. Introduce this idea to your students and give them access to a range of ways they can do this:

• use games – visit Transum Games to see their collection
• use routines – use Corbett maths 5-a-day, a classic routine to engage students
• use internet-based work – Complete Mathematics has a Times Tables app.

Show students what resources are out there and let them decide which ones work for them, and when they can find just half an hour every day to practise.

Strong foundations

Good maths skills depend upon mathematical fluency. For students this year in particular, it’s likely that homeschooling and online learning will have impacted this.

The nine basics of maths – addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, percentages, scale and ratio – are the foundation stones. You wouldn’t build a house on dodgy foundations, so we can’t build a mathematician without these solid foundations either and, in the words of Banarama, ‘it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it’.

All roads lead to Rome

There are 16 different ways to calculate a multiplication so limiting students to the common algorithm will hamper progress if they struggle with it. It’s time to say ‘I don’t think you learn it like that’. Mark McCourt, Chief Executive at La Salle Education, tells us there’s no one right way to build a secure knowledge of times tables, so explore a range of mathematical methods with students and let them identify which suits them best. Encourage students and colleagues to share methods with one another too and think about which ones you want to promote as a team.