Maths Mastery
Intent
At Lynch Hill, we constantly strive to enable all pupils to be the best they can be, from nursery to year 6. This is why we now work on teaching for mastery in maths using Power Maths, supplemented by White Rose. This takes place in mixed ability groups, allowing for high ceiling shared learning within each group to ensure all pupils are challenged with quality learning opportunities for all.
With maths mastery, teaching is no longer about procedures, shortcuts and tricks, its rather about understanding maths concepts. Using real life contexts, teaching practical maths right from EYFS throughout the school, ensuring the pupils appreciate that maths is a life skill needed to prepare them for everyday life.
Implementation
Our maths mastery curriculum covers the EYFS and National Curriculum targets and takes the pupils further and deeper in their understanding. This is a whole school approach to the subject – consistency across all year groups and ages.
Across the school the pupils investigate the concrete form of maths (physical situations and resources), progressing on to pictorial (representations and diagrams) and then finally the abstract (symbols and calculations), in order to fully appreciate an idea, enabling them to apply their skills in all kinds of settings.
Fluency sessions are designed to enable pupils to commit key skills to the long-term memory, thus freeing up space in the working memory for assimilating the new concept-based learning of the maths master scheme.
Children of all abilities are supported, from those who struggle with basic skills to those who need to stretch their understanding; a programme of keep up (not catch up) and deepening activities for rapid graspers, is skilfully implemented across the school on a daily basis.
We encourage pupils to be more independent in their learning, by maintaining our high expectations and utilising the 5B strategy (Brain, Board, Book, Buddy, Boss).
Timely end of unit assessments ensure that the children are tracked; with support implemented if required.
We are committed to helping parents understand how to support their child in the wider context outside school, from practical experiences to Online access – such as times tables, times tables rockstars, dBPrimary activities linked to their current learning.
There is a continuous cycle of staff training, moderations (Inter-school comparisons), networking and shared experiences to best inform teacher practice and supply quality first teaching.
Impact
Lesson visits, show that our classrooms are buzzing with activity – enthusiastic discovery in action. Talking with the children, we find that maths is more real to them, and this engages them, producing improved behaviour for learning. They can identify the maths within an every-day problem and have the confidence to apply their own chosen strategies to solve this. Pupils can explain their reasons and justifications for this using accurate mathematical language.
Maths Mastery at Lynch Hill School Primary Academy
At Lynch Hill, we constantly strive to enable all pupils to be the best they can be.
We continue to teach for mastery as this ethos adopts new strategies from the traditional successful Singapore style maths and combines them with successful tried and tested British teaching to achieve the best outcomes for our pupils in the modern world.
Process
Under the lead of our ncetm trained maths specialist teacher, we are utilising the effective PowerMaths scheme, complimenting this with resources from the widely known fully aligned WhiteRose maths scheme, we craft our curriculum to meet the expectations of the national curriculum and meet the needs of our pupils.
Staff Training and Support
As the maths mastery concept is very different from the traditional form of teaching maths, all staff continue to be fully supported in this long term endeavour. This is being achieved by:
Our specialist trained maths lead teacher, who spent time guiding local schools in their first steps to maths mastery, is currently focusing on the journey of our learners. She works with a maths team from across the year groups to prepare and cascade the new teaching and learning to all staff in the school.
Staff continue to develop their practise to deepen understanding of the maths mastery style and ideals, along with an introduction of new maths mastery resources in all classrooms to support the learning and understanding of all pupils
Regular assessment of our journey along with training and support are available for all staff to ensure the most successful implementation of the scheme and highest outcomes for all pupils. Ensuring that TAs are included in the training and development of the new teaching style is of key importance to maintain the highest possible levels of support in all maths mastery classes and in turn, outcomes for all pupils.
What does Maths Mastery look like?
Teaching and learning looks very different from the ability-setted, success criteria-led, repetitive process learning of traditional British maths teaching.
Extra maths fluency time has been introduced to the timetable to develop the understanding of key concepts such as number bonds, times tables as well as mental and formal written methods of calculation. This is designed to enable pupils to commit these key skills to the long-term memory, thus freeing up space in the working memory for the new style concept-based learning of the maths mastery scheme. These sessions incorporate personalised support for all learners – consolidation or pre-teaching for those who find maths challenging to reasoning and problem-solving activities for the rapid graspers to ensure they develop their thinking.
Mixed ability groups in the mastery sessions allow for high ceiling, shared learning within each group to ensure all pupils are challenged, with quality learning opportunities for all. The carefully designed programme of learning ensures that there are fewer topics, which are studied in small manageable steps to ensure deeper conceptual understanding. Learning is designed to utilise carefully devised increases in challenge to enable all pupils to apply their maths skills in a wide variety of settings; carefully planned variation enables pupils to make and use links within and between their learning
Seeing patterns, making links and mathematical generalisations ensure opportunities exist in every learning session for the deepening of ideas and breadth of understanding.
Differentiation is evident through how deeply and widely the pupils can reason and problem solve within their independent task. This is achieved through the completion of carefully crafted increases in the challenge and variety present in a wealth of mathematical settings
High importance is placed on the CPA approach, to ensure all pupils have means to develop their conceptual understanding using concrete, pictoral and then abstract ideas (see the Maths Mastery Calculations Policy for more details).
Support for those needing extra help
The PowerMaths and White Rose schemes have been expertly designed to minimise the need for interventions of this kind – the ideology is for pupils to keep up, not have to catch-up. It is recognised that some may need support from time to time, staff expertise and resources to enable this are available.
The extra daily learning sessions can be utilised to provide personalised provision in addressing misconceptions from the previous learning session or pre-teaching in preparation for the next learning session
Support for the more able pupils
Learning sessions are carefully designed to enable more able pupils to explain their understanding, rather than just calculating a numerical answer. This might be through exploring different ways to solve the same problem, responding to or creating their own generalisations, providing them with questions where there is no clear signpost so they have to devise their own strategies to tackle them effectively, or explaining ideas or misconceptions that have arisen. There are many ways of doing this but we challenge pupils by deepening their understanding and ability to apply this in a range of contexts, rather than pushing them on to new content ahead of their peers.
Marking and Assessment
Daily marking allows for teachers to identify trends and individual needs to be addressed on a day to day basis. Individual work on varied fluency and problem solving and reasoning informs teacher assessment which is recorded on the school’s online assessment tool. Termly assessments are built into the White Rose Scheme to support ongoing assessment.
Maths Mastery
Maths mastery is a long-term journey that all staff and pupils travel together, with constant and timely review and improvement of teaching and learning. We look forward to continued success in maths at Lynch Hill and thank all our parents and carers for their continued support.
Click here to download our Calculation Policy