LittleStreams: Maths Mastery Matters
- LittleStreams
- Jul 14, 2016
- 3 min read
Firstly, we’d like to welcome you to our guest blog here on Colin’s site as we work on developing our own blog. We look forward to engaging with everyone here on new and exciting issues in education and how LittleStreams is responding to them as a proactive and creative company.
Where better to begin than with the recent news story about the £41m of funding being offered to UK schools to engage with the Chines Maths Mastery approach to learning maths in the classroom?
What excites us most about the Chinese “Maths Mastery” is the positive energy is puts into inspiring children to learning maths to a deeper level. It is a worrying truth that in the world league tables the UK languishes over twenty places behind China (Hong Kong and Shang Hai) in mathematics education and despite numerous changes in policy and curriculum, very little significant progress has been made. So hearing that 8,000 primaries in England will benefit from the programme is really good news.
The debates about why the UK are so far behind are long and complex , and although LittleStreams does follow them, we don’t want to explore here. Maths Mastery is simply too exciting to bog it down with political arguments.
One of the key differences in the Maths Mastery approach is getting children to visually represent their maths and calculations, and focus their time on deepening understanding rather than racing ahead with new learning. This feeds very naturally into teaching in classes of mixed abilities. Indeed, even when teaching in sets there is a large difference between the very top and very bottom of a class in ability level.
Rather than breaking the class up into ability-appropriate subgroups, Maths Mastery focuses on keeping the class together to learn and develop techniques. The fear of this in the UK system is that lower ability children get lost as they struggle to keep up, whereas higher ability with languish in boredom. But Maths Mastery clearly presents a major solution to this problem and turns it into an advantage: and this is what we want to learn more about in LittleStreams.
The focus then becomes of getting children to deepen their understanding of what they have learnt with the intention of ingraining it as knowledge and technique that children can apply. In addition to teaching technique, this also comes from the use of textbooks rather than working from individual worksheets.
"We want to empower and energise the learning of maths, and Chinese Maths Mastery sounds like it could be another great way to do it."
LittleStreams totally understands how to create top quality worksheets to support the UK and US systems, but now we want to explore how our work can be informed and enhanced by the Maths Mastery techniques. We’re not a textbook producing company, so we want to explore – with the help of trained teachers – how we might support the bridging of UK/US maths learning with the Maths Mastery approach, and produce products that widen the accessibility of this to Tutors, Parents and children outside school.
So if LittleStreams can support children’s learning by embracing the Mastery techniques, applying them to the work we do and offering it in our products, this could greatly help children and young people to continue to progress at a higher level. Let’s not be fooled: £41m funding for 8000 schools in England might sound like a lot of children, but as far as we are concerned, that barely scratches the surface. So we want to know how to share Maths Mastery with Tutors who won’t get the training, Parents who are unlikely to be told much at all about it, and the children who aren’t in those 8000 schools.
Above all, helping children and young people to conquer the “I can’t do maths” mantra that so many get trapped into has always been a driving force behind the way we design our products. We want to empower and energise the learning of maths, and Chinese Maths Mastery sounds like it could be another great way to do it. It’s quite hard to deny its success, coming from the number one country in the world for maths education.
So for now we wish to say: “Watch this Space” on Maths Mastery. We’re excited by Maths Mastery and we want to research it, speak to teachers who are training to use it, and then find ways of sharing it.
The first stage of learning to swim is to dip one’s toes into the stream. Here at LittleStreams, we want to go for paddle to find out just how much Maths Mastery matters.
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