A maths lesson we should have learnt

The Government has recently announced its new maths plan: ‘Make it Count’. So far it has been light on details, and it will be based on a curriculum that is yet to be released, but we can infer what this new direction for maths teaching will look like. I would recommend the Government takes on board some of lessons learned in recent history, before throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Throughout the year we’ve heard Education Minister Erica Stanford talk about “structured maths”, “explicit teaching” or “maths mastery”. Each of these are different things – structured maths is not even a ‘thing’, but a borrowing from the structured literacy fad. Whichever approach is taken, it will include a much more teacher-directed approach with specific guidelines for the structure and content of maths lessons.

On the one hand this is a welcome development in the sense that it signals an investment in professional learning for teachers. It has been two decades since primary school teachers received any centralised support for their maths teaching, which amounts to an entire generation of teachers having no systemic professional learning in maths; no wonder our results were sub-par. The $20 million the Government is putting into professional development is a good start.However, it is worth taking a moment to consider what we have learned, or should have learned, from the last time a nationwide professional learning programme was rolled out in the subject of maths.

That is, when 20 years ago, the Numeracy Development Project hit almost every school in the country. It was based on a well-researched theory of learning, came with a set of resources, and in-school support was provided to help teachers understand how children learn maths – and subsequently a new way of teaching them. Many teachers of this generation learned much from this approach and felt supported by the teaching guides. These ‘pink books’, as they were called, became almost like a bible for maths teaching and promoted a number of different practices, including grouping students by the ‘stage’ of number-thinking they had demonstrated.

The ‘science of learning’ is another theory that helps us to think about the way children learn maths. And similarly, it is about to be developed into an approach for teaching, often called explicit instruction. This is a highly sequenced approach whereby procedures for solving problems are broken down into chunks for children to learn. This method is not as different to the Numeracy Project as proponents of explicit instruction might think.

So let us learn from the mistakes of the Numeracy Project before we jump feet first into this new approach.A theory of learning is not that same as a theory of teaching. The translation from learning (often developed in ‘laboratory’ contexts) into the messy and complex classroom is not straightforward. There are many more things that must be taken into account when teaching than simply how an individual child might best learn when on their own.

When the Numeracy Project was translated into teaching some unintended consequences crept into the regular practices of our maths classrooms. For example, knowing that there are multiple strategies a child might use, led to a misunderstanding by some teachers that children should be taught all of the strategies before they could move on to the next learning outcome. This resulted in some being held back and not advanced through the content as quickly as they might have been.

A second detrimental practice that came with the Numeracy Project and endures in some schools well after the project’s demise, is fixed ability grouping. Grouping children by ‘stage’ of thinking, as promoted by the project, soon became entrenched in practice and morphed into a label of ability. And in my opinion, the practice of ability grouping (functioning similar to streaming at secondary school) is primarily responsible for the decline in maths achievement of our ākonga over the past 20 years, because it capped the learning opportunities for all those not labelled as ‘high ability’.

An enormous amount of local and international research shows fixed ability grouping leads to lower attainment on average and widening gaps in attainment across every year level.

The Numeracy Project led to wide-scale ability grouping in primary classrooms and became common practice. Now teachers have few other strategies to address diversity in their classrooms.

As we are on the cusp of another nationwide maths teaching experiment, we should look back to recent history, to avoid repeating the mistakes we’ve already made. Most importantly, we must realise that a theory of learning does not automatically translate into a theory of teaching.Incorporating ideas from the science of learning into our classrooms will almost certainly lead to unanticipated consequences that could be detrimental to learning, and thus defeat the good that comes with professional learning and increased funding.How might we mitigate this? We need to respect the professionalism of our teachers. We need to develop those with lower confidence in teaching maths. We need to give them the resources to support a new approach, but at the same time we need to ensure they maintain an attitude of critique.

We need to allow our teachers to adapt the resources to suit their own students, and for this they need time. Rushing into a new mandated programme in 2025 is too much too soon.