In two weeks time on October 13th I will be delivering a session that shares the title of this blog. The blog is meant to act as a preview to the session.
“Mastery”. Some people see it as the latest buzz-word to be
shunned until we wait for the next “big thing”. For others it is central to
teaching. For some it is a confusing term with no clear idea of what it
actually means. And I can sympathise with all of these views…
The idea of “mastery” has been around for a long time.
People much more knowledgeable have written about its provenance, its history
and its progress to the modern day. Neither this blog nor my mathsconf session
will be trying to reinforce or reinterpret any of this. I will not be
attempting to explain the structure of a mastery curriculum (which is not
exclusive to a mathematics curriculum). Better men than me have already done
this, not the least of which is the LaSalle CEO Mark McCourt (if you haven’t
read his blogs on mastery then you must). Saying that, it is important to
understand certain aspects of its structure to understand where I hope my
session fits in.
One of the central aspects of a mastery curriculum is
teaching in a way that all pupils can
access from their starting point, and then carefully assessing their
understanding throughout the teaching process. A second is the use of
correctives where the initial teaching isn’t successful – having different ways
of approaching concepts when the first way falls short. The biggest aim of my
session is to try and showcase some of the ways that teachers can approach
this. Starting with what I see as important ideas to consider when thinking
about structuring learning, I then aim to share practical examples of
approaches that could be used either as part of the initial teaching or as a
corrective approach. For those that know me, it won’t be surprising to hear
that much (but not all) of this focuses on the use of representations to reveal
the underlying structure of an idea (given that my book “Visible Maths”
is entirely concerned with the use of representations and manipulatives to reveal
underlying structure).
As an example, but not one I am using in the session,
consider the “rule” that one negative number divided by another negative number
results in a positive answer. Consider -15 ÷ -3:
One way of representing this is to use double sided
counters; these usually appear with a yellow side (positive) and a red side
(negative). Two different coloured counters can also work, and in fact to model
this calculation we only need to consider negatives so a single colour of
counter will suffice. The image above shows -15, and now we have to think about
how we divide that by -3. One way of thinking about division is to think about
creating groups, so a possible way of looking at this calculation is, “Start
with -15 and create groups of -3.” These groups can be seen below:
When we think about division like this, the result of the
division is “How many groups can we create?”. We can see that this process
creates 5 groups, which means that -15 ÷ -3 = 5.
Often this “rule” is taught as an arbitrary rule, without
any attempt to show where it comes from. In many classrooms, one could be
forgiven if kids believed that the only reason this is a “rule” of maths is
because teachers says so. But this rule is a necessary rule – if division works
in the way we know it does then the answer to -15 ÷ -3 cannot be anything but 5.
I finish my session with a discussion around other “rules” of maths, how
appropriate representations can show where these rules actually come from, and
also discuss how we can manage the transition from using
representations/manipulatives to the abstract calculations. Hopefully I have
whetted your appetite to hear more about teaching approaches that can support
mastery in mathematics, and I look forward to seeing you (whether in my session
or not) in Birmingham. Don’t forget to join us for the pre-drinks and
networking the night before as well!
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