Do you want the students in your class to be able to pass a maths exam? Or do you want them to become mathematicians?
If it’s the latter, you need to look beyond the skills listed on the curriculum, says Dr Ems Lord.
“If we look at the maths curriculum that we’ve got, [it] focuses on fluency, reasoning and understanding,” she says.
“But there’s a difference between passing an exam in maths and working as a mathematician, thinking mathematically. What’s in the curriculum [is] really important for being a mathematician, but they’re not the only things that are needed.
“Yes, we need to know number facts and procedures, and we need to understand what we’re doing, but if you’re not careful, that doesn’t give you the flexibility to solve unfamiliar problems, or to overcome challenges when you get stuck.”
So what skills are needed, then? How can we ensure that students can overcome challenges in the maths classroom?
Lord is a research fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge and director of the universities’ NRICH project, which provides thousands of free online mathematics resources, and on this week’s Tes Podagogy, she answers those questions.
For Lord, there are two skills, or qualities, in particular, which really matter when it comes to being a mathematician: curiosity and resilience.
Curiosity, she says, is particularly hard to define and demonstrate in the classroom. The key is in the questions you ask, as the teacher, and that you get the pupils to ask.
“It’s about starting to think like a mathematician: so if you showed them a picture of some fencing and there’s a repeat with panels, what might a mathematician ask? We show them the school dining hall with all the tables out, what might a mathematician ask about that?” she says.
“It’s so important in the classroom because the OECD reported in November a positive correlation between having curious students and high attainment in maths. So we know we’re doing good things if we can get them to be more curious.”
However, at the moment, curiosity isn’t particularly valued by the education system, she adds: it “dies off” as children get older, and decreases further as they work towards exams.
“So, as teachers, we can do an awful lot by valuing curiosity, and making sure that children know it’s valued in our classrooms, whether it’s through our displays, or through our teaching approaches,” she continues.
Listen to more Podagogy:
With colleagues at NRICH, Lord has been working to support teachers in the development of both curiosity and resilience in the classroom.
One resource that has attracted thousands of downloads has been an approach inspired by the Rope Model, which was first proposed by Jeremy Kilpatrick and others in 2001. It covers five different strands of mathematics: understanding, tools, problem solving, reasoning and attitude. In all five strands, there are opportunities to foster curiosity and resilience.
Lord also encourages maths teachers to use curiosity and resilience “ladders”, which were born out of specific research NRICH undertook in classrooms across the country, and detail the steps needed to support these skills.
In the podcast, she discusses how to embed these steps, the challenges teachers have faced and how they’ve overcome them.
