Episode 203: Maths was in EVERY child's top 3 subject! Unbelievable!

Welcome back everyone to another exciting episode of the school of school podcast. it's exciting as normal. have Adam Gifford here and Robin Potter are regulars. You guys can say hi, but you gotta do it really quickly because we want to get to our special guest. Okay, good. And we got Wendy Lou here when Wendy is a veteran mass mastery expert, all kinds of accolades and all kinds of wonderful things about her story. So Wendy, just tell us a little bit about yourself for our audience.

Hi, I'm Wendy and I've had over 24 years of experience in primary education and last 15 years solely kind of mastery maths route. Yeah.

So look, want to, we want to, when do we want to find out about some of your experiences? We want to know. mean, I know you...

In a previous episode, we talked a little bit about your research paper, which you can also tell us a little bit more about right now. But I'm really interested in knowing what your experiences are working with schools and working with teachers in England and over the, you know, over the course of your journey and, and, and, um, maybe some of the insights that you've had.

So, you know, I don't know, Adam, do you want to kick us off with a specific question? That was really broad just to help her out. What are you interested in finding out from Wendy?

The big thing for me is that you get you're in a wonderful position that you get to see a lot of schools. So you get to go in and you get to talk with people and see the impact that this approach that moved you ten years ago has had on children all across the board and I wonder if there's any standout like I don't know just just experiences that you've had that just confirm what you already believed but you you get a chance to see it in lots of different settings whereas most people

probably wouldn't, they'd be in their school. So I know if there's anything that jumps out to you or anything that you just think, yeah, these are some of the things that have had quite a profound effect.

Sure. About five or six years ago, I think I was asked to join a school on a three-day part-time basis as a primary maths specialist teacher in a junior school, so years three to six only. And at the time I persuaded the head teacher to bring in Maths — No Problem! because I felt it was the right scheme for the school.

So bearing in mind, we didn't have the children from early years and Key Stage 1, we only had them at Key Stage 2. We implemented Maths — No Problem! and I did a lot of in-house training because I was there. I was there to support them, support all the teachers and do lots of training. It was amazing. I remember sending out a pupil voice, doing a pupil voice survey and

At the time I'm talking about a really deprived school. We've got high pupil premium. Lots of ethnic minority groups in there and lots of EAL. And I sent out a pupil voice survey, so we've been doing Maths — No Problem! for maybe three or four months and they were asked to rate their favourite topic, favourite subject in school and every single child put maths as one of their top three.

It beat things like computing, PE lessons, music, art. Yeah, every single child rated maths as one of their top three subjects. And that's because they loved the style of learning from Maths — No Problem!, because it was so open and so collaborative. And it wasn't...

You know, they said it's not, they get it. They'd get the maths. It's not boring. It's not scary. They didn't feel that when they made errors that they were laughed at. It was a secure environment for them to learn and they learn together with their friends. So they love that. And I remember in that first year, so we only implemented it one year, the first year, bearing in mind the year six had probably had about maybe six months max of that teaching.

In that first year, we managed to up our SATS results by around 19%, which was amazing. That's significant. And then the following year, so within the two years, it was a 37 % rise from that original first score. So I know it works.

I really truly believe it works. also, you know,

I mean, I remember it was an uphill struggle. I knew it would be an uphill struggle. We had a lot of very, how can I say, not older teachers, but kind of set in their ways. Yeah. So really traditional teachers and even some of the younger teachers were quite set in their ways and I had to turn it all around. So I did a lot of training. I showed them, I modelled lots of lessons.

Did some teacher research groups and I had my own kind of a group of teachers around me that helped me champion the scheme across the school. And that really helped. But once they saw the children's enjoyment and actually they really enjoyed it because they weren't having to plan as such. You they weren't having to find, scrub around for resources, everything was there.

And I said to them, the only thing that you need to really prepare is you need to really know your lessons. You really need to know your children. You really need to know what the possible misconceptions are and what your non-negotiables for that lesson is. And I said, go from there.

And I said, we're all here to help. If you've got any questions, ask, you know, any one of us within our kind of champion group. And it really worked. And I always remember I had one

one particular lady who was really stuck in a way, and she was the math teacher for the year six maths teacher. And she really didn't like it at the beginning. She questioned everything I had to say. Why do we need to teach it like this way?

I've been teaching it like this with donkey's ears, always worked, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, well, just, just try it and see what happens. And do you know what? She came back a few weeks later and she said, actually, Wendy, that, that really worked. And

And she said, I've learned something new and I didn't know I could do it like this before. And from that moment onward, it became kind of an open door policy. Anybody could come just chat. And I think it really helped boost everybody's confidence or the teachers confidence in teaching the subject. And it was really successful, really, really successful. So it was brilliant. And I left them after a couple of years to move on to something else. But yeah, brilliant.

That's such a positive story. It's really encouraging to hear that and the fact that the teachers are learning as much as the students are learning. switch gears slightly because I know with your research paper and you looked at Maths — No Problem! and some other companies, you talked about how soft skills have been really important. First of all, can you define soft skills because people may not be clear on what is a hard skill versus a soft skill.

A soft skill is essentially what 21st century employers are looking for. The ability to work as a team and collaborate, the ability to communicate, to articulate well, skills of kind of perseverance and resilience, critical thinking, creative thinking, lateral thinking, all of those skills in order to problem solve what your company needs basically.

And those skills can all be taught through a typical maths lesson. So rather than just chalk and talk and the teacher just tells you everything, you know, do this, do this and learn it by rote memorisation.

Maths should be taught in a way where children discover the learning for themselves. And that's the most powerful type of learning. And once they've discovered it one way, you might challenge them to discover it in a different way and that leads to lots of variation and therefore they can then take what they know and apply in many non-routine situations which is what problems are.

You know when problems arise they're not always going to be routine, you know, you've got so many bananas and whatnot. So in that way you're developing those soft skills which are so so important for any employers these days.

Yeah, that makes sense. mean, certainly collaboration now is key, you know, and often because people are working remotely, you know, it's so important to be able to come together with those opportunities to think as a team rather than individuals

I remember 20 years ago I listened to the head of recruitment for BT and she was talking about saying that they could basically walk into Oxbridge and decide who they wanted so they would get the top graduates every year and it changed about 20 years ago. She was talking about the fundamental shift of the fact that technology allows us to work in really quick moving geographical areas where you've got members of groups all over the world.

And the problem solving skills that were needed, you know, weren't always coming from these traditional places. They started to realize that pretty quickly that that sort of knowledge economy or just knowing, I just know this, I know a huge amount of things, wasn't cutting it with what they needed to continue to develop sort of cutting edge stuff. I know people think BT and they just think phones and hands, but actually a lot of stuff they were doing was utterly cutting edge.

And I think that that was 20 years ago and that's only accelerated. And I think that knowing that that's that fundamental shift that we've got to prepare our children for that. But I think also, like you're saying, we've got to ensure that our teachers see that that's possible too. That those skills being developed, know, that mathematics is a vehicle to, an amazing vehicle to develop those skills.

Teachers have got to see that that's the case, you know, and I think that that's a really important thing.

They have to understand that maths is no longer what they think it is. You know, it's not about the calculations and the computations and getting the right answers. It's actually the journey to which you get to the answer. That's what maths should be all about. And until teachers really understand that, for them, it's only ever going to be right or wrong answers. Last year, I did a talk with the parents and parents from my school.

And I spoke to them about the significance of maths, you know, and actually the feedback from it, you know, they said it was so eye-opening because they'd never thought about maths that way before. They only ever thought about maths being able to calculate things or, you know, being able to weigh something.

And they didn't realise that actually, it was actually not the maths that we were concerned about. It was actually the skills that are taught whilst teaching the maths that is the most important.

And so for them, for the parents, said, well, that was really eye-opening that they never actually thought about that at all. And that's the same for many of the teachers, really.

Can we unpack some of these things? So we're talking about these soft skills now. Just a few of them. I mean, I have my list. Other people have their own list of what they are. Maths — No Problem! have a very clearly stated list, which maybe is the one, the core competencies, I guess, that we call them, of which there's five. But you'll find other words being used in education. One that's thrown around lot around mathematics is fluency,

which is think maybe the most confusing one for a lot of people. But if we talk about things like you mentioned, communication very specifically, right? Like communication is so important. I think the way I would explain communication, why is communication so important? We've all run into those children who just know what the right answer is, right? It's like you give them a problem to say, well, it's seven. Okay, great. Why is it seven?

And how can you actually help this other person who doesn't see it the way that you do understand why it's seven, right? Because what's the use of having someone who's so clever that they can just automatically know what the answer is. And I'm using clever in quotations here, right? If they can't actually articulate or communicate that with anybody else, are they any use to anybody? Right? So communication is one. What's another one?

Well, you know, it also develops, you know, within communication, the language. For instance, if you introduce the language, this is why love about the map, the way we teach maths through the CPA approach and this kind of whole free play approach, because if you introduce the language too soon, they very often children might have misconceptions around that language. But because they're using the language in a kind of adequate way.

They sometimes mask the fact that they might not understand things. So actually at the beginning when they are learning through collaboration and through play, having to struggle with that language is really, important. And then later on when we kind of incorporate that language within, they're then using that language within that communication correctly, which is really important as well.

And then we're wrapping in, you know, some very important learning theories. So obviously we've got Zoltan Dienes in there because Zoltan Dienes very clearly specified, like you've got to have an under, you got to have a kind of a in your own language understanding of something before it gets structured into like a word or before you label it, right? That structure needs to come later because, because, the reason, you know, it ties in very strongly with, with, with this assimilation and accommodation concept.

that Piaget introduced, which is that, you know, in order for you to actually accommodate the idea in your schema in your brain, right? And not just merely assimilate it, like assimilate it, like just gather facts that are not accommodated for, you need to have that. That has to happen in the play stage. That's what the play stage is all about. So that you can challenge your own understanding with physical things so that you accommodate the idea. Only then shall you label it.

because otherwise along with the labeling comes all the misconceptions, right? Which then leads to all kinds of problems. So in an example in a podcast we talked about before, simple generalizations that people run into. When you multiply two numbers, right? It's the product, right? The product is going to be larger than the two numbers, right? Well, that's not always true.

Yeah, exactly. But that's a concept. That's a misconception. you try to formulate that too early, you'll have that misconception. You'll struggle later when you're with... We talked about fractions before, You divide two fractions, or you divide two numbers, and the quotient...

The answer, the quotient is going to be less or smaller than the two numbers that you've divided. If you divide two fractions, it's sometimes or almost always larger. So those things come from, like you have to experiment with the concepts. And those are the kinds of the soft skills that we do. Those are the misconceptions. If you don't do it right, that creates a problem later.

But it also I love the fact that we you know you you build in misconceptions within the actual scheme as well. So you know yeah, which is brilliant because you're you're giving that as Piaget says the equilibrium, isn't it?

So you know you're providing that equilibrium in order for them to assimilate and associate, you know and accommodate. So it's it's you know, I love the fact that within the scheme it provides that.

So as a teacher you don't really necessarily need to think about it as such. You just need to know what why it's there and how you can then help children to understand that that is a misconception.

And it always makes me cringe when you know I hear teachers say oh when you multiply by 10 just simply put zero on the end. You know I hear that all the time and I'm just thinking oh you know you're just planting so many misconceptions into these children's brains you know. But yeah.

It's one of those things that you don't know what you don't know.

Aside from that zero comment, because that's a good top tip, teachers listening out there, if there was one takeaway for people listening to this podcast, what would it be?

So if it's one takeaway, I would say really know your lessons, really know what you're planning to do, really know what you want your children to learn by the end of the lesson, and allow them that time and that freedom to go away and do it. And trust in the process, I think. Trust that they will get there. You might need to guide them, Sutton. You might need to facilitate alongside. But don't jump in too soon.

Because I think that's the fear. think a lot of teachers fear that the children are not going to get that answer. And so they jump in and they tell them or they guide them too much. And therefore that learning that deep, deep learning doesn't actually happen for them.

And you think you're doing them a service, but actually you're doing them a disservice by jumping into it soon. just trust in that process and allow them to have that free time. And also understand that

Not everybody will get there at the same time as well, give them the right tools, give them the right guidance, and they will get there.