Episode 189: How Bar Modelling took over Bermuda

Andy Psarianos

Hi, I'm Andy Psarianos.

Robin Potter

Hi, I'm Robin Potter.

Adam Gifford

Hi, I'm Adam Gifford.

Andy Psarianos

This is the School of School podcast. Welcome to the School of School podcast. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the School of School podcast. We've got Adam Gifford here, we've got Robin Potter here. Say hi, guys.

Robin Potter

Hi, guys. I know your joke, Andy. I know it so well.

Adam Gifford

I'm not going for it.

Robin Potter

Yeah, I know.

Andy Psarianos

Deep down aside, Adam is a non-conformist, right? That's what he's told. Today's exciting because we got a special guest and it's Crenstant Williams. And Crenstant Williams has been a real force in the Bermuda education system, and he's on with us right now from Bermuda. Crenstant, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself for our audience, and we'll jump right in?

Crenstant Williams

Okay. My name's Crenstant Williams. In my current role, I am the acting principal of Port Royal Primary School in Southampton, Bermuda. My recent role before that, I was a math officer for the past four years for the Ministry of Education, and prior to that I was deputy principal at West End Primary.

Andy Psarianos

Fantastic. Crenstant, we want to talk to you about bar modelling because you introduced bar modelling into Bermuda. You were one of the first to import this over. I mean, bar modelling is something that obviously was sort of conceptualised in Singapore, but I think it's used very widely around the world now. It's a method for problem-solving. So Crenstant, tell us a little bit, why bar modelling? What was interesting about bar modelling? Why did you introduce it to Bermuda?

Crenstant Williams

Well, I don't think I introduced to Bermuda, I might've introduced it to the public skills system. As I said, I met Adam Ardenberry at a workshop at Work Academy. When I went there, he showed us the bar model approach with, I think he used, and also pictures. He used picks of a hamburger to order french fries to solve simultaneous equations. And I sat there, myself and a couple of other teachers, and I was sitting there and I looked and I said, "You mean to tell me they could have taught me this in high school and math would've been much easier, instead of telling me there's factors and all this other nonsense and words and letters?" I was like, "This can't be." So sat there and it was a three day course, which, my principle at the time, Ms. Cindy Weeks recommended I go to.

I didn't go willingly, I must admit, but I'm glad I did go now. And I had a conversation with Adam at the end of the workshop, and I said to him, "Work Academy is a private school. Why can't this be exposed to all of Bermuda?" Because my belief has always been it's one Bermuda. So he said, "Oh, sure, by all means. If you want to talk about it further, we can." And as I said, my role at the time, I was the Chairman of the Educator's Council, so made a contact with Adam, took him to my school, met my principal, Ms. Weeks, and we started talking about how we could possibly get him to come back to Bermuda and we start. Then I met with my PTA, I think she was the treasurer, Vivian Carter. And so she had a foundation and she said, "Find all the course."

So we spoke to them and then we got some funding. Adam came over and it just blossomed and went from there. We show people, "Okay, here's a bar model approach." And what I liked about it, using the bar model approach, it could go from P1, all the way up to senior school. It's just about how you implement it. So it gave the children, for me, a foundation of explaining math and math came alive. It meant more instead of just telling me, "Well, two times five is 10." How do I know two times five is 10? Or teachers, instead of just no, they would put up, say, "You have the rectangle on your board. Johnny has five apples. How many apples does he have remaining?" And they would be able to say, the children, you see him draw the bar, they split it down the middle, say, "If there's five on this side, the other side must be five because I know that five plus five is 10," and they'll prove it.

They write the sentence to say, "I know that I have this amount because this is, I can prove it." And so it's those type of things, which for me, stood out. And then after that, it went even further because I was introduced at Work Academy to the Math, No Problem books. I was like, "Wait a minute, this is what I like." And the guy, Mr. Benhar, he's the guru for that. So I went to that workshop, got the books. I spoke to the lady, and then I said, "Well, no, this has to come to Bermuda somehow." Because this was for the private school people, but Crenstant is one of those people where I see something, I like it. I don't take no for an answer and I just figure out a way how to make it happen. I think, Andy, you came to that workshop when I think I met you up at Work Academy. Yes.

Andy Psarianos

2019, absolutely. I remember it.

Crenstant Williams

There you go, right. Went from there and I kept in touch, and then I spoke to Deloitte and Deloitte agreed to bring Benhar back, and we did the same thing for the public school teachers. And I got some many books for West End and we used them. Now I'm trying to hopefully implement it at Port Royal for September, because I realise it definitely works. The bar model strategy, it is just phenomenal. I swear by it, I live by it. I eat, sleep, drink it. I think it's the best thing ever for mathematics.

Andy Psarianos

It's interesting because we hear this a lot. Because when people are first introduced to it, they have exactly what you described, which is that aha moment. Which is like, "This was so painful for me to learn." You talked about simultaneous equations, I know the question you're referring to with the hamburgers. And it's so difficult to learn that if you have no visual understanding, just do this, do this, do this, do this, and then there's the answer. And it's all, for most children, a completely meaningful process. They just remember the steps, they have no idea what's going on. But then when you do it with the bar model, all of a sudden you understand what's going on. And as an adult, when someone shows it to you, you just have that aha moment. You go, "Why was I not taught this?" You're almost angry.

Crenstant Williams

That's exactly what happened to me. That's exactly what happened to me because I realise what we do in school, we teach children formulas. That's all we're doing, we're teaching them a formula. So they're going to forget it by the time they leave high school. But if you actually show them how to solve it and why X equals five, it sticks with them forever.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah, that's absolutely right.

Adam Gifford

Your attitude, something that made me sort of giggle was when you said, "I was reluctant to go on the course." And for various reasons, would you say that your attitude is probably typical of a lot of teachers that didn't know about the approach? And depending on what you answer, what was your plan? If you had that moment where it changed you and you're thinking, "Why wasn't I taught this way," then by default, you want the children to be taught that way, what was your plan, the long-term plan to keep it going? And maybe even into the future now, but that first part, do you think your attitude was maybe typical of a lot of teachers that it's like, "No, this is the way we do it, this is what we do?"

Crenstant Williams

Well, you have to understand you're teaching all day and then your admin says, "Oh, by the way, I registered you for this course. It's from 5:30 to 8:00 after hours." You have been teaching all day and for three straight days. You know when 3:00, 4:00 comes, you're knocked off from work. Your vibe is, "I'm going home, I'm going to relax. Whatever I need to do, mark my children's work." And so typical teacher, I don't feel like getting into this. And then Work Academy is a private school, so the private and public schools, we don't really know it's better, but we didn't really collaborate together.

So I'm going to a school where people I don't really know, so it's kind of out of my comfort zone. But then when I got there and I saw a couple of other public schools teachers, and then the teachers at Work Academy, they were very friendly and welcoming, and they were even sitting there like, "Hey, I wasn't taught this either." So it was like, "Wait a minute, I'm not the only person that doesn't know this." And I'm like, "Well, they work here and they don't know it, so it's not that bad for me." So then I said, "Well, if this is this simple, then I need to make sure that my teachers understand it and my students understand it." So I deliberately said, "As the chairperson of BEC, I'm going to make sure that all my teachers now in public education get exposed to it."

And so that's when we mapped the plan and Adam Ardenberry and his team, they came down and we did the training approach. We did, like I said, a lot of resources, a lot of training. And myself, I went and did a whole lot of research into it. And then like I said, the icing on the cake for me was to get Mr. Benhar to come to Bermuda. We had him up at Cedar Bridge Academy, and he put on a workshop for our public school teachers. We had 27 teachers that attended, and they were still like, "Why wasn't I taught this before?" It was that same thing. That's all you kept hearing and you're just like, "I wish I could answer that, but I can't."

Robin Potter

Yes, it's a game-changer. I was there and just sitting with the teachers and hearing their feedback and hearing them from... And also, I should say you do remember that it was at a holiday.

Crenstant Williams

Yep, it was.

Robin Potter

So we had teachers, the teachers were coming and it was like their week-long holiday they're spending in a classroom. That was a huge commitment right there, that was dedication right there. But then to come and some of them were very familiar with it and others were not, and the ones that were not, you could see the resistance from the get-go and the confusion and not understanding. And then by the day two goes by and suddenly-

Crenstant Williams

The light bulb went off.

Robin Potter

The light bulb went off and they were just so engaged and it was like a complete mindset switch, you could just see it happening. And it was so exciting to see because you have the resistors, I would call them, those that just refuse to get on board. And even they were on board by the end, so yeah, that was great.

Crenstant Williams

For me, one of the things that I think helped to also change a lot of people's minds, one year we took the P6 checkpoint exam. And we went through the exam and I think it was like 90% of the questions we were able to solve using the bar modelling strategy. Once teachers saw that, they were like, "Hey, wait a minute, Williams is onto something here. I need to now shift my focus." Yeah, that also helped.

Andy Psarianos

That's a big thing. And I think that you know as a pupil, as a student, if you can get it embedded early enough, they can't even imagine doing maths any other way really, right? It just makes so much sense to them if you get it early enough. And teachers, same thing. When teachers realise, "Oh my goodness, I can teach all these concepts, ratio proportion, fractions, algebra, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, using the bar model," you go, "This is amazing." This is the hook that gets them all in.

Obviously, at some point they leave the bar model behind, but when they get into, maybe later on in high school and certainly by university, they're not probably using the bar model on paper, but in their head, they still see it that way. They still understand it that way because that is the math and it's just amazing. The struggle is students, when they've developed a mindset, you talked a little bit about this earlier, by the time they're in P6 and they've done it the other way, their whole... They don't want to do it because they're like, "Well, I already know the answer. Why do I need to write all this stuff down?" How do you deal with that? How do you deal with those children?

Crenstant Williams

That's what I tell you, the incentive comes into play. You have to incentivize your classes. I'm a firm believer in incentives. I'm sorry, call it what you will, but I believe in incentives. As I said, I remember one particular year level, there was this gentleman, he would walk in my class. By the time I finished writing the question, he would have the answer, but he would never have any type of working out. It became kind of a struggle, so I said, "Okay, listen." I said, all right, "Crenstant, you seem to know the answers all the time," her situation.

"I know that you like pizza. We sell pizza every Friday, so I know you normally get two slices. When I put up this question on the board, you get it correct with showing me, proving to me that this is correct and give me your word written up afterwards, I have to buy you two slices of pizza. And if you do two of them like that, then I have to buy you four slices." What you think happened? I'll just leave it there.

Robin Potter

He did the math, yeah.

Crenstant Williams

Yes, he did. Yes, he did. And it's funny because I saw him the other day and he hugged me and he said, "Mr. Williams, I just want to tell you thank you for teaching me math." Because he is on his way now to do his doctorate and he said, "You made math fun." And he said, "You might not believe, but you actually saved my life, because now I look at things differently. Now I have to prove things." I was like, "Wow, yep."

Robin Potter

That's inspiring.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah, that's really inspiring.

Crenstant Williams

It's amazing, these small things that we take for granted when they come back and tell you, like, "Oh, okay, so I did make some sense after all."

Adam Gifford

Crenstant, what's the next steps? What are the next steps for you? Because it's clear that you identified these, you put the work in, and something like that just totally validates everything that you've done. What are the next steps? What have you got your eyes on next?

Crenstant Williams

For me, on-going training, because I think that's only way we're going to build a community of people that learn math and feel excited about it. I did tell the minister and the ministry that I believe that Bermuda can be the hub to prove to the world that we have the best education system and best teachers for mathematics in the world, and that's what I believe.

Andy Psarianos

Good for you.

Crenstant Williams

Yeah, that's how I see life.

Robin Potter

Yeah. Well, and most people cannot say that or believe it.

Crenstant Williams

Well, I try.

Robin Potter

Yeah, it's excellent.

Andy Psarianos

I love the story of your people coming back, and I think that's an important thing to remember too, is the real impact that teachers have on people's lives. Because hey, let's face it, we all know that by becoming teacher, you're going to be rich and you're going to be famous, right?

Crenstant Williams

Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

But that's not why most people do it, right?

Crenstant Williams

Yep, make millions of dollars, get all these endorsement deals, sneaker deals. Yep, that's what it's all about.

Andy Psarianos

But that's not why these people show up. The teachers, they're building the future of the country. They're building the future of the nation. It's as simple as that, right?

Crenstant Williams

Very simple.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah, and it's lovely when you have someone who comes back and says thank you. "Thank you for what you've done, thank you for being you." There's nothing better in life, is there, really?

Crenstant Williams

Nope. For me, that's the joy I get out of education, to see my students excel. That's what I love to see.

Andy Psarianos

Thank you for joining us on the School of School podcast.