Research School Network: Plan Maths? But we have a ​‘scheme’? It’s already been planned…

The title of this blog is a direct quote that I have heard on more than one occasion. I can definitely relate to some of the reasoning behind it. As a member of SLT, partial to the odd budget meeting, I can empathise as to why such a (monetary) investment may be seen that way. As a teacher, and still in the classroom teaching, I can see why someone might think like that. But, as a teacher, still in the classroom, I know that teaching is an art and that lessons are crafted, not purchased. As the Maths lead in a primary school, I knew that I still had to ​‘plan’ Maths. What I didn’t fully comprehend is how very different Maths planning has become in recent years. I was sat in a conference room full of ​‘buzzing’ Maths leads who lead work groups as part of our local Maths Hub (that this ​‘tweet’ was shared from). It made me reminisce about our mastery journey…(INSERT heavily filtered picture of me and the former Maths lead with Yeap Ban Har) …ponder…and then ask myself…’Does everyone in my school know what I mean when I say Maths planning?’

But before we delve into the staff at my school, I needed to ask myself a question. ​‘Do I know what I mean when I say Maths planning?’ For context, I work in a school that bought into the idea of Teaching for Mastery back in 2015, when I was starting out my career in teaching. The school that I was training at, and went on to work at, bought one of the DfE approved schemes and it was one of the only things that I felt I was on a level playing field with alongside the staff at the school. There was a lot of new learning for me during my SCITT year, but this was something I was able to learn at the same time as the most experienced staff at the school. I loved it, just like I loved Maths when I was at school.

Fast forward nearly 10 years and I found myself questioning what Maths planning was, is and what it will become. I was confident, after observing Maths and navigating my way through an Ofsted deep dive in Maths, under the new framework, that the ​‘5 Big Ideas of Teaching for Mastery’ (NCETM,2017) were present in nearly all lessons. I didn’t, however, always know if some of these were accidental, incidental or deliberate.

This all brought me to reflect and think about what I could do at my school that would allow me – and the staff – to purposely notice the ​‘5 Big Ideas of Teaching for Mastery’ in our planning and the resources provided by our choice of ​‘scheme’. The idea of collaborative planning didn’t jump out at me at first, but this is how it all started. Aside from teaching, I am a Primary Mastery Specialist, working with my local Maths Hub, allowing me lots of time to further my own development and understanding. At one of my Maths Hub CPD days, we had a session on Zoom with Debbie Morgan, the Director of Primary Mathematics for NCETM, around collaborative planning. She shared some thoughts and ideas, and we trialled it in triads to experience how it felt, what worked and what didn’t. We agreed that what we weren’t trying to achieve was to re-plan or critique something that was already suitable but, instead, question some of the choices made in the scheme/​resources that we all use, hopefully allowing us to become more confident and prepared for where the journey of learning in the lesson should and/​or might go. We asked ourselves the following questions.

>What is in the existing resource and what might be missing?

>How well matched is it to the pupils they are working with?

>What will it look like in the classroom?

Once we had considered the questions above, we then considered four questions – that have evolved over time – but that we often come back to when planning.

>What do I want them to learn?

>How am I going to facilitate them learning this?

>What if they find it hard to learn this?

>What if they find it too easy to learn this?

By asking ourselves the above 7 questions, we felt more confident knowing what the lesson could/​should look like, where it sat within the National Curriculum and how we were going to scaffold and challenge our learners so that all could access the learning. This led me to think about how I can help all staff to go through this process better when planning every lesson – even when planning alone. I will delve into this in greater detail in the next few blogs as it seems that it is suitable to treat this blog like a Maths lesson. You can see this first post as the ​‘retrieval’ activity and the first few small steps.