Research School Network: From Mimicry to Sustained Mastery Empowering teachers and faculties to make a sustained change to teaching practice
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From Mimicry to Sustained Mastery
Empowering teachers and faculties to make a sustained change to teaching practice
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by Somerset Research School
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Mark Robson
LLME for Boolean Maths Hub, Secondary Maths (EA) for Somerset Research School
Mark Robson has been involved in secondary school maths education for 17 years. He graduated from the NCETM’s Mastery Programme in 2019, culminating in a trip to Shanghai on the UK Shanghai Exchange Programme. Shanghai or anywhere, Mark is always on the look-out for interesting ways to present maths to young people. In his current role as one of the LLME for Boolean Maths Hub, he provides lots of professional development around Teaching for Mastery and is always seeking interesting ways to get maths educators to think about their own pedagogy. In summary, he is quite inquisitive and likes to promote this in others.
Empowering teachers and faculties to make a sustained change to teaching practice
I’m a maths teacher of 20 years and a Secondary Mastery Specialist of 7 years; I have run a lot of CPD sessions for fellow maths teachers in that time. This blog is about how the EEF Guidance Report on Implementation is changing the nature of the CPD I run.
If you had attended one of my sessions five years ago, you would have seen some really creative applications of Teaching for Mastery, taken those ideas away, given them a go, and most likely enjoyed a little success in your classroom. On reflection today, what I was giving people was a very short-lived success.
The EEF Guide to Implementation is 60 pages long and contains the word sustain, or a derivative of that word, 20+ times. This resonated with me as I read it. It left me thinking, “Has the CPD I’ve been running left a sustained change on the teachers and faculties I have worked with or, has it all been a one-hit wonder?”
The Guidance Report states, “Embedding the approach in the school’s systems and structures makes it more resilient and likely to be sustained” – P49
So if, for example, I am running a Mastery Session on Coherence, I might share an example on a given topic. On Standard Form for instance, I will show how I start with the students’ secure knowledge of Place Value and show them how this prior knowledge connects to this new topic.
In early CPD sessions I ran I may just have said, “Why is it useful for students to see maths like this?” I would sew the seed of an idea but, I found that teachers just took this example, from this one topic, used it once and the principle of Coherence never permeated their curriculum or their ongoing practice.
Having my focus now on ‘Sustained Change’ I will ask that same question but then set my delegates a task. ‘In pairs, pick a topic you are teaching soon and plan how you are going to start the teaching so that the learning appears coherent to pupils. How does that topic coherently connect to their prior learning?’. Ten minutes later I’ll ask them, ‘Explain your topic to another pair’. A few more minutes, ‘Move again and explain your topic to another pair’.
The next task is, “You can see this principle in action for several topics now. How are you going to embed this in your faculty’s teaching? What shared resources do you use in which you could input these ideas?”. In addition, I will ask, “Does this principle feel important? Is it something we should be taking away and writing in to our implemented Curricula so that it becomes part of our daily practice as maths teachers?”
I’ve also changed the way in which I run CPD with schools and trusts. I’m no longer interested in seeing teachers or faculties for a one-off CPD session.
The Guidance Report says, “Strategies that help sustain an approach include revisiting and adapting plans”
If it’s just a one-off CPD session the million things that those teachers have to consider in their daily lives will quickly do away with any learning they did with me. It’s important that I revisit those teachers, that workgroup, that school and revisit prior CPD. I might have set a gap task after the last session. ‘Put the Coherence ideas we shared today in place in your curriculum and add resources for three other topics’.
A few months later when I meet those same candidates that’s the first thing we can revisit. “How did it go? Are your whole faculty on-board with Coherence? If not, why not? Are there any topics we struggled with?”. If it’s a goal worth attaining for the benefit of young people and their learning then it’s a goal worth revisiting, and making necessary changes to plans, to make it successful.
In summary, I used to be quite an ineffective PD lead. Ideas were mimicked and led to short-term success. Upon reading the Guidance Report, my focus now is not on simply sharing great teaching ideas; it’s on how to empower my delegates to use the principles behind these ideas for themselves. Only by doing that will I actually be having a sustained impact on the children they teach.
