Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Teach
Sleep Repeat. My name is Dylan.
And my name is Hayden. And is we, we wanna make it
really clear that you know who we are?
Because quite often, I guess I say, is Dylan the bald one?
No. No, no.
How do they describe you then? There.
Is no, he's the one. We'll let you guys throw that in
would. You put into that now phrase,
there's something something Dylan.
He's the gorgeous one. He's the gorgeous one.
That's all I was waiting for. Give you a nice.
One, that's all I was waiting for.
Someone did do a comment the other day about that joke that
we always say, which was it was both of us were in the video.
It was a clip on the podcast and it it was we were talking about
something to do at school and this guy commented absolutely
nothing to do with what the actual reel was about and just
commented saying these two guys have the right amount of hair
for two people just in the wrong place.
What? Thanks mate, some serious point
like that. It's.
Schools are at crisis funding point.
You've got lots of hair. He doesn't know.
Brilliant. I've got, I've got to mention a
comment we got this week. I really tried to stay positive
because we get so many amazing messages and comments and lovely
stuff all the time. And I, I genuinely don't mind
when people disagree with stuff because we put stuff that can be
quite controversial out there, like opinions that people don't
often say out loud maybe. And some people might genuinely
have a disagreement and I don't mind that at all.
But there are two times where I kind of feel like I need to
reply to someone. 1 is where we've explained something in a
real like really clearly. Like for example the one I can
think of straight away is the teacher martyr 1.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we, we said a teacher
martyr is someone who puts hours and hours and hours extra
outside of work. OK, into the job.
Yeah, and judges other people who don't do that.
Yeah, OK. We very clearly said that it's
about the whole idea of you judging other people.
You wear as badger one or you think other people who don't do
it. The whole package.
The whole package, Yeah, yeah. The amount of people who
commented on it going. I completely disagree.
I work extremely hard, thank you.
And I'm not a martyr and I just, I, I feel the need to, I need to
reply because I'm like, OK, so this person did this and I
replied saying, do you judge other people who do less than
you and think they're a worse teacher because of it?
Because if you don't, then I am not talking about you.
And then the reply was just, well, I think it's quite rude
actually. I'm like, Oh my God.
And she, she literally said, well, I thought this was a place
for discussion. Clearly not.
I can't just air my opinion. And I was like, look, no, I
don't mind people saying things back that disagree, but one, you
have to like reference correctly what I said in the 1st place.
And #2A discussion involves two people.
When I replied to you, you can't go well, I thought this was a
discussion. Yes, I'm replying.
I'm going to having a discussion.
Joe at least watch the reel before anyway, I love, I love
seeing you get triggered. I love it.
I love it when I sometimes you run the Instagram, I'll look
through the post and I'll see some comments and I'll see one
reply and I'm like, I'm like, here we go.
I'm going to open this up and it's going to be Dylan being
really sarky. I try so hard because I ignore
quite a lot of comments and if people disagree, I'll have like
a conversation with you. I kind of understand what you
mean. That's I think this because of
that, but I completely get what you mean when someone just like
completely misrepresents what you say in the literal video
they're commenting on. I'm just What is wrong with you?
I'm not talking about you. Loads of people work really hard
as a teacher. I don't think you're a martyr
because of that. I think you're a martyr because
of the way you act about it. If that's you, if it's not you,
I am not talking about you. Keep scrolling.
Yeah, Yeah. And if it's.
Rude. Dylan, It's rude.
OK. You're making comments about
other people. Yeah, whatever.
But the other and at least they're trying to back up their
corner and and argue for something.
The other type are just people I think are insane.
And with those I tend to just like leave a laughy face or
something because I'm just like, I can't even be bothered.
What was? That one, the other, you did
something, yeah. So this is the one that if you
follow Instagram at teach PPP podcast, which everyone should
do by the way just need it 20K followers by the way yeah
amazing one on Anyway, someone commented I did a meme.
So firstly it's a meme. Anyone leaving a serious comment
on a meme honestly getting the bin it's a meme.
It's a joke. Anyway, this meme was the
caption was something like when a child says, oh, my teacher did
elf on the shelf last year. I can't wait to see what the elf
gets up to this year. And then the idea was underneath
it was me as in the teacher and it was just someone going I
don't think I'll be doing that. Basically, I because I don't do
elf on the shelf, but I personally think it's a waste of
time and I don't like it. If you do it all, all goodness
to you. I don't care.
Brilliant. I don't honestly.
Well, you don't. Think it's objectively bad.
Yeah, I don't think it's objectively bad.
I don't think it's objectively good.
I get when people say you shouldn't do it because of XI,
get when people say I do it because why?
Sometimes you're allowed to have a disagreement.
There's not one right answer here.
I don't think you don't. Care whatever, I just.
Don't care, I don't do it. Whatever someone commented
going. If you seriously can't be
bothered to do something like this for the kids, then I don't
think teaching is for you. It was just like, I was just
like, and she was being dead serious, right?
And I was just like in my head. I came out of seven different
replies that one, one was serious, one was funny, 1 was
witty, and I just landed on 4 laughing, crying emoji faces.
I can't even do that because you know what?
I knew other people underneath would reply and they did all the
replying for me. There are actually people out
there who genuinely right will judge teachers based on things
like that before even seeing them teach.
The amount of people I've seen online say to me, well you're
clearly not a good teacher because there's something I've
said that is completely separate to my actual ability.
To really far removed from really, if you think about if
someone said like write down on paper, what's a teacher?
They wouldn't, they wouldn't even they wouldn't even write
that thing down. It's like it wouldn't even be on
the list. Yeah, genuinely, it's like you
have absolutely no idea how much time and effort I put into
teaching, how good I am at teacher.
I could honestly, to this person, you could be the best
teacher in the world. Like you don't do half on the
shelf. Yeah, that classroom, but
either. All right, DJ, are you?
Oh. Let me guess, you haven't even
got them all a Christmas present each individually wrapped with a
Christmas card that you've made at home.
I bet you haven't even done that, have you?
Yeah, guys, nuance. OK, if you do that, cool.
Yeah, I don't do that. It doesn't.
Make you a bad teacher. Exactly that.
And you know what, it can make you a good teacher in a way, in
terms of if you're judging people on doing like going the
extra mile in that respect for the kids.
I'm not against someone saying, wow, that's really cool for the
children, aren't you great? What I'm saying is it doesn't
automatically mean the opposite. Yeah, exactly.
That's what we've literally said on this on this podcast.
Other times building relationships with kids is
really, really important and probably if not the most
important thing to do as a teacher, right?
So obviously doing something like that is helping you build a
positive relationship. So we're never going to say
that's a bad thing or it does nothing.
It's just yeah, like you said, the opposite is not then true.
By default. I just couldn't believe it.
I was like, anyway, that was my week in social media.
Tell me about your your week at school.
Make at school what we did. I got one story and it just
reminded me again about how kids are really quite simple, aren't
they? As in like they're.
Then some people think, oh, I couldn't possibly work with
children. That's just so complicated.
We did a states of matter lesson and the stuff we were doing,
honestly, I looked at it and I thought phase there's a like,
it's quite hard for your four children.
Basically the idea of particles like I, I love this.
And, and you can, you can get across to a, a nine year old
what particles you can do that. And the lesson was successful.
But I just looked at the whole thing and I just thought, God,
this is like, this is quite abstract.
By definition. I, I physically can't show them
particles. So you can represent it in
different ways, get out the blocks and stuff and talk about
particles are and there was one part where, so I said to them,
OK, guys, listen, we know particles are really small.
You can't see them. They were like, is a grain of
sand a particle? And I thought that's such a good
question. I love those types of questions.
I was like, you're thinking of the exact.
Right way in the size limit. And I was like, listen, they
they act like grains of sand in certain situations because they
all come together and they take the form of different things of
liquid, solid, whatever. But no, if you can see it, it
can't be a particle. They're so small and they're
like, OK, cool. So I said, right, So what are we
going to do now? You guys are going to be the
particles in a in a material and you're going to either be a
solid of the liquid or a gas. So I got them all stood up in
the middle of the room, made a little bit of a clearing.
I said, right, you're all particles right now.
I'm going to say state of matter and you need to act that way.
We've just gone through it in the board of pictures and stuff
and how it would look. So I said solid and they all
clump together, but they're all moving around and joking.
I'm like, no, no, no, no, I said, I said solid.
It's rigid still. You're touching, it's rigid.
It's still. And then one of them just goes,
we've got to be like Penguins. They all get together.
They're dead still. They are having the time of like
the time of their lives. This is what I mean when they're
simple, this little tiny thing where we just did this for four
minutes and a lesson completely transformed now that they'll
remember it and they really enjoyed it and they loved it.
And and that's what I mean when you say you don't have to go
over the top of lessons, sometimes just have to be a bit
of interaction. How did it go when you said to
do gas? Well, this is.
What we're going to go to now, so I said liquid.
And. The point again, I saying to
them, I let them just do what they were doing, but they were
like running around basically. I was like, no, no, look,
liquid. The particles still touching,
they're still together, but they can move around each other, but
they still have to maintain the fact they're touching because
that's what the particles doing in the liquid.
They've got a bit more energy. You've got a bit more energy
now, but not enough to break free.
So then they're going around that corner from gas.
Whenever I say gas, gases expand and they leave each other.
And when I say gas, you need to go back to your seat, basically.
And that was what a gas was just spreading back out.
Oh. That's cool.
That's nice. Idea, but I said only when I say
gas and I was like ready solid and then they start running.
I'm like, Oh no, God, get back and they'll be really still and
you go backwards solid, liquid, solid, liquid and then you
finally say gas and they go back to their seat.
So then they'd like laughing their heads off.
They're loving it. They're, they're really, they're
ready to write stuff down then because they've just acted it
out. And one of the kids, you could
just tell who's really excited about it.
Oh, can we do it again? Can we do it again?
And I was like, OK, not ready. But what I'm going to do if I
say solid, liquid and gas now and have my hand in the air,
you've got to get out your seats and come and do it because we
were doing a lesson on solid, liquid and gas.
I'm going to say this word so often.
And I was saying, I was saying, I was saying it.
And then I just forgot that I'd said that.
And it got to the end of the day.
They were getting their stuff and I said, your table, get your
stuff. And this lack of up to me goes,
when are we going to do that again?
And I was like, Oh my God, yeah, of course.
And. I was like, listen, at some
point tomorrow I'm going to do it.
So tomorrow, which was Wednesday, it was English
completely separate. And my English class are all
from my class. So we'd all done that lesson
yesterday. I just I put my hand up in the
air and I like sometimes I do it to get their attention.
And I went solid and like four of them ran out, including that
boy And the rest of like, what's going on though?
Oh my God, all ran out in the middle of English in the middle,
pretend to be solid. This solid, liquid gases ran
back. And this whole time there was
one girl just sat in the corner like, what is going on?
She wasn't here yet. She wasn't here yesterday.
No clue. Just said solid kids and she
went, what's going on? That's such a good experiment.
Like imagine if she just went and just got up and joined in,
having no clue what was going on.
She had no idea. Oh, that's really funny.
The idea of that story basically is your kids want to enjoy
learning just just little tiny things, little tiny tweaks like
that. Honestly, a bunch of them will
remember stuff now. They might not have done that
one. Would you have been worried
because it's a legitimate thing? I think I know what you'll
think, what you'll think. But would you have been worried
if the head teacher came in during that moment when they
were most hyped and then maybe they maybe were running when
they were supposed to be liquid if they hadn't quite made worked
out what liquid was yet Like? So it looks like chaos, nothing
written down in their books at that point.
Would that have thrown you off? Honest, not one bit.
Like I said a million times at the start of my career, maybe,
right, But there's two situations here.
Number one, as the teacher, you just need to be confident in the
fact that you know they're learning something right now.
OK, that's the first thing. The second thing, if you're in a
school where that's actually a problem, leave the school.
If you're in a school where the head teacher comes round and
you're doing that and you say, oh, maybe they asked for an
explanation, that might be annoying, but you're like, OK,
fair enough. Of course, I'll explain it to
you then. It's because of this if then
it's still a problem. Leave school.
Yeah, it's not the right the Haiti.
Just says OK I can see what you're doing but it did mean
they got less written down in their books and now I can't see
as much evidence. Leave the school yeah, get out
the toxic honestly leave the school yeah, genuinely, because
my point with that is I don't know why I can environment.
Yeah, it crushes your career. And it might, you know what we
see we use toxic a lot. Like it probably is toxic.
Maybe it's not toxic in the way we think of like treating people
awfully and stuff. Maybe.
I wouldn't say, oh, it's not a toxic school though.
And let me have my kids run around the classroom.
But what I would just say is, OK, if that's actually what you
think here and you you have that much of a problem with it that I
couldn't possibly do this even though I've as professional,
I've said This is why I'm doing it.
Yeah. And you still can't see that.
Then then I would leave the school.
Yeah, we're not compatible. Exactly that.
And there is compatibility in teaching.
There is. Yeah.
Like there are going to be some schools that literally just fit
you better. And they won't fit me exactly.
And you know what, it might be reasonable, honestly, it might
be reasonable for someone to be like, oh, just maybe we don't do
that. Then maybe there's AI don't
agree with it. I don't have to agree with
everything. I think people listen to this
podcast and they think, wow, your school must be like 10 out
of 10 and everything you agree with absolutely everything that
goes on. No, I'm an adult and I'm doing a
job and there are some stuff, there's some stuff I like that I
do. There's some stuff I don't
really like and agree with, but I still do it because it's my
job. And there's other stuff which to
me is past the line where I'm just like, OK, I'm going to
bring something up or ask about it.
And it's the. Negotiation of some sort.
Maybe it's not. Yeah, it's not.
Yeah, I agree. I agree.
I hate the idea that we paint this picture that that we work,
we happen to have the Unicorn perfect environment.
No, no, no one works in that Unicorn perfect environment.
It doesn't mean it's a bad environment.
No, no, not at all. Exactly.
Yeah, there's troubles. There's you're always working on
something in that school. That's the thing, isn't it?
Like it's never just oh, done. Everyone, every single person is
happy. Every single child is happy as
well. Woohoo, made it doesn't happen.
It's impossible. It's absolutely.
So you thought in the last week of term a good thing to do?
Good thing to do was get the kids up and riled up running
around in the last week term right before Christmas?
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.
Why not? I don't know about you, but
maybe, maybe it's the year. I've got your sixes, but I feel
like at the moment if I give them an inch, Oh my God, they
take 5 miles. Genuine, genuinely like
behaviour at the moment. I did that again right into us
because we love it. But Christmas term right before
Christmas, balancing that normality with actually having
some Christmas fun as well. Like we make Christmas cards and
stuff. I find it so tricky because I'm
always on edge because there's always someone that just takes
advantage. Do you, I mean, do you get that
in your for sure, yeah. All the time and and again as a
teacher, that's part of our job to deal with that.
You know what I mean? Like that and and again there's
two forks you can go down. Yeah, the first four kids I'm a
bad teacher because these kids are becoming unruly.
Don't think that. But it's Christmas.
These kids are going to not have perfect learning behaviours
right now. It's OK.
And then the second path is have high expectations still and
still and still call out behaviour that's passed the line
for you. Because we've always talked
about this line and this really strict line you have to have as
a teacher, you have to have this line you expect.
It's almost inevitable in Christmas that line shifts
because maybe you've put some Christmas music on right whilst
you're doing an activity which they can sing along to some
Christmas songs. That by definition, your line of
behaviour of your learning behaviours you want to see has
moved because you. Wouldn't normally let them sing.
If they started singing in a massage, you'd be like, what are
you doing guys? Come with your work.
Unless it's Hamilton. Of course.
Well, that's allowed at any point in my classroom.
But that my point is in Christmas the teachers and the
adults and the school were actively moving that line
because we'll say to them, oh, no English or maths, they were
going to the church for service. Oh, by the way, no afternoon
lesson because we've got, you know, Elf Express coming in and
we're going to go to see Santa's Grotto and stuff and there's
Christmas fairs going on. We're moving that line
constantly and we can't move the line.
And then the moment the kids for not understanding where that
line is, yeah. Yeah, No, I agree.
I agree. But like equally, like you said,
you can't then just get rid of that line.
No, no, let it completely erode. I tell you a quick funny story.
It happened to me this week that I just literally thought of
right now. We were doing classic that kind
of lesson like we changed our afternoon.
It was a bit more fun. We did some Christmas cards, we
did some DT sure. And just literally, I was, I was
on hot glue gun station. So, you know, when you're like,
I'm thinking I don't want the kids to use this because I know
someone's going to stick their hands to their feet.
Yeah, like what are you doing? And someone goes to scratch
their head like, oh God, Oh no, oh God, this is.
Stevens put all this glue on my hand for the for the work, not
my head. Let other people know it's
actually a glue gun incident that caused you to cut your hair
off. Exactly.
That's how you look, yeah. Exactly how it happened.
That's what I tell the kids, but I'm honest, just sad sat there
doing some glueing. I looked over.
This is 5 minutes in 5 minutes in, right?
We're barely even started and they're, you know, they're
having a whale of a time. Look over.
There's just a kid in the corner who has wrapped his entire hand
with he's used the whole roll of sellotape that I gave their
table. Every table got a roll of
sellotape, whole roll wraps his whole hand all the way down
through his forearm and he just looked at me.
You know, when they give you that look of they absolutely
know there's nothing they can say to get out of this.
They know they've done themselves in right at this
moment. He looked at me with that sort
of kind of smirk, thinking please find this funny but also
like I know I've done wrong and I was just like come on man.
Did he just do a Samos snap? No, he didn't because there's
too much on it. He couldn't get it off.
It took him 5 minutes. Obviously I was like, oh, for
God's sake. So yeah, that's what I mean
about the the madness of this last time.
Because you know what? I think if I did DT maybe at the
beginning of the term and that I think I don't think that would
have happened. But even if it did, do you think
you would have reacted differently?
Probably. I want to ask you very quickly.
I know, I know we're doing like a catch up and stuff.
I want to talk about maybe that right now because I'm, I'm quite
interested. I feel like we are, if you think
about a traditional teacher, I think we're more laid back on
the scale. OK, in terms of in terms, in
terms of what? So let me, let me explain in
terms of attitudes, OK, in terms of strictness and behaviour, I'm
not talking about that because I think we're quite strict still.
Personally. I think we are very strict in
fact, because I don't think strictness means mean I'm
talking about traditional. Like I, I will not shout and
demean a child ever really. Like unless it's, I feel like,
gosh, I need to shout because either you're not listening at
all or it's safety or something. Yeah, it has to be like a real,
real reason. Whereas I think sometimes other
teachers use that as a management tool.
I'm going to strike. All the time.
All the time because I'm a teacher, you know, do that.
Yeah. My point is there with like
someone doing that right literally Stan a tape in their
entire hand. Up to their elbow, right?
Yeah, yeah. Is that an instance where you
should really reprimand and be like just say to our dad is
completely unacceptable, not have an an ounce of smile or
happiness or do you still approach that with God stop.
That what do you want to wait? The line, yeah, because.
I feel like I feel like I'm somewhere in the middle of that.
I did not remotely raise my voice at this kid, genuinely.
I said, I said what are you doing?
Oh, immediately regretted. What is that?
I said no no, no stop stop. You start trying to take it off.
I said no stop, stop, stop. I said keep.
Going leave the room. No, I literally said I said
leave the room. I said you go down to the head
teacher and you explain to him why you set up your hand to DT.
No, no, no, I won't. It's OK.
I said no, stop, stop. I'm not saying take it all off
right now. I said there need to be a
consequence. Off you go.
And he was an illiterate. No, no, no, I said it's an easy
lesson to learn. I said you'll come back in 5
minutes, Go and tell the head teacher Mr Stevens has sent me
out because I've said I take my whole hand up in my head.
I'm sort of laughing at this point to be honest with you.
I'm in my head, I'm thinking this is kind of funny and the
head teacher's probably going to find this funny as well by side.
But in my head I was like, I don't want to just shout at this
guy. He's just having honestly, he's
just having a laugh. Is it the worst crime in the
world? Not really.
Do I really do I go home that night thinking, God, I'm so
annoyed about that. No, not at all.
I wasn't really annoyed. I just thought it's just
slightly frustrating that it's. A lesson to land still, though,
because. Went to their teacher, came back
5-10 minutes later with a hand, a free hand and I was like,
there you go, you won't do that again, you won't do that again.
Finish, don't, don't worry about it.
And we cracked. It and then none of this class
have sellotape anymore so they can't do the DT.
That's fine, just just sit there.
I. Touch the whole class because of
it. So before we before we move on
to the main part because I think we enjoyed it last week Remember
last week when I had a few rile up Dylan things to go and you
were getting worried that the time was getting on.
Can I do that last one? Yeah yeah yeah.
Can I tell you something I saw online that I thought would
annoy you? Maybe we'll turn it into a
frequent thing. Yeah, maybe, maybe.
If it's not, you know what? Most weeks I reckon we need a
Jingle. For it like a specific one,
yeah. We do, don't we?
I'm not going to say we are nearly 100 episodes.
We still not really. Thought about doing anything
like that have we when we started this podcast, you
remember you were like we need to have sections like to find
sections that we do every week and it's like no, we don't
maybe. No, we could or we could put no
F in anyway right? So here we go.
I saw this online, someone said the headline called me straight
away. Can you request not to move up a
pay point? And I thought here we go.
This teaching is the only career this is going to happen in
right? Currently UPS 2.
Wondering if I could request and not move to UPS 3 despite it
being on the cards at my school. It feels like UPS free is is
just use of a stick to be experienced teachers.
Oh, you're UPS free so you've got to do these extra things.
Well you should have done that because you're UPS 3 blah blah
blah. You've heard all that sort of
stuff. So the question is literally
then can I request to stay on UPS 2 and then not be lumped
with extra work with UPS 3? What's your feelings on that?
Because there's a million different comments, which I
won't. Go into yeah, well, straight
away when I hear anything to do with upper pay scale and it
justifying more work outside of the job, I'm under the
impression that it's been repeatedly refuted that UPS
means you have to do more stuff actual physical like leading
math or leading a year or leading a key stage.
I think it's used very frequently for that incorrectly.
I think a lot of schools will say, well, you're UPS so.
You can lead English. XYZ you want to do a textual
stuff and it's like, well why do you think TLRS exist?
Yeah, like a TLR literally exists for a teaching and
learning responsibility, which is separate to UPS.
It might, from what I've seen from union advice and guidance
and stuff, is that the upper pay scale is literally just a way of
boosting up your experienced teachers because they are
exactly that. And they have an impact on the
wider school, which can be through many ways.
Yeah, not simply just leaving a subject.
You can have an impact through the wider score, through sharing
your planning. Yeah, you can have an impact
from, you know, mentoring an NQT or something.
And even informally as well yeah those things get missed.
What the passive informal experience running an assembly
just doing that or even just being able to just do something
on the spot yeah there's a bit of an emergency I need I need
someone to run assembly right now.
It's not been planned. OK, That remember staff, you're
way more experienced. You're probably gonna be able to
do that like little passive things, even just being in the
year group, right. You for people in the year group
as an NQT and as a really experienced member.
And the NQT goes to the experienced member just
occasionally informally, totally off the books, just saying.
How did you do that lesson there?
I do it still. I talk, you know, I work with
someone who's 30 years in this game and I regularly go to her
when it's things like DT and where I'm not as confident.
I'm like, how did you teach that one?
What did you did you give all the kids this?
Did you lay out on tables? And she'll just tell me and I'm
like, cool, banging us. That's really good advice.
Those kind of, that's what it's for, isn't it?
Yeah, it's not for taking your TLR.
There's got to be a reward for being an experienced teacher.
We've talked about this a million times.
This is another example of one of the real posted where people
were very much like, yes, that's brilliant and other people were
like you. You don't teach for reward.
You you should be doing it for the kids.
Stop. If you're a really experienced
teacher, there is genuinely nothing past the top of the main
pay scale unless you go to this upper pay scale.
So the idea of the upper pay scale should literally just be
rewarding that experience. It shouldn't be a transaction
where, OK, I'll bump you up, but you need to give me 10 hours
back a week. Don't leave the English.
No, it's a reward for being experienced and for and, and are
we going to, are we going to solve retention?
Are we, are we actually going to solve retention?
Well, this is a tiny part of that which you're wanting to
take away. Yeah.
So this itself won't solve retention.
Just giving someone extra 2 grand in a year.
It's not going to solve retention, but it's going to go
a certain way to just feeling a bit more value.
Yeah, it helps a bit. It does help a bit.
So don't. Get rid of it, because just
because it's not going to solve a problem it.
It will make it worse though, if we pretend that it's a.
Part of the solution, it's not the whole solution.
Yeah. Do you think we should get rid
of UPS 123 and honestly just have M1 to M9 just just have a
continuous scale? Like why do we even have this
threshold I? Think it would probably be a
good thing in terms of it would get rid of this idea that you
have to do something extra. I'm convinced people teachers
listening to this, maybe you can say, Oh my gosh, yes, I
completely agree. I am completely convinced that
that there is absolutely no reason at all why like upper
management, government, DfE, Ofsted, there's there's a reason
why they haven't actually gone about trying to change stuff
like this to help workload and well-being and things like that.
There's a reason why they'll put out a report and say, yeah, we
do too much, why don't you stop photocopying?
That doesn't actually help well-being whatsoever and
doesn't actually reduce workload and doesn't actually go as far
as something we said last week about putting in an overtime
thing for teaching or just having set out.
There's a reason why it's so flimsy and great because it
benefits them. It benefits them that schools
are using UPS for this kind of transactional agreement that
you're going to go through UPS, you need to give me more work
because there's no money for that work to get done.
So they pretend that the UPS is for that, that there is a
benefit to exploiting teachers and workers in this way.
And the benefit is more stuff gets done and it's at the
detriment of teachers well-being.
So if you're at the top and you're thinking, OK, we can
really actually change teachers well-being and actually reduce
their workload, but we don't have any extra money.
So that is just going to mean that less happens for the
children and and English isn't LED as well, or the discos don't
happen after school or the clubs aren't run for the children.
They're making that choice to detriment a teacher's well-being
over impacting a child's outcome.
And the point has to be here that you could argue all day
that the children's outcome is more important than a teacher's
well-being. But that's what's getting us
into this crisis right now. So if you're going to actually
fix it, you've got to make hard decisions that involve money
being put in the right place. And if it doesn't involve money
being put in the right place, because you're saying we
literally don't have the money, what I'm saying is then you
literally have to lower the expectations.
I've talked about this a million times.
It's a seesaw, the expectations of the teacher and the money we
put in at the minute, it's way too heavily put into what's
expected of the people and the only way to solve it, sure, no
money. OK, well we have to lower the
expectations then because we cannot keep going.
And this is just one symptom of that.
In my opinion. This is 1 symptom of how we are
just exploiting people to get more and more work out of them.
When you can say no, you can go to UPS 3 and do no more than
you're doing on UPS 2 just because you're more experienced
and you're a better teacher because.
Of it, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it.
And it keeps you in the job, honestly, that.
And that's enough for me after everything you said, that was
amazing. And I was already convinced that
it it might help retain me, though.
Yeah. OK.
Do you want a really good teacher in the school?
Hey, go give them a couple more ground.
Done. UPS 3.
But I don't know. I don't know.
I think your analogy was really good because my gut feeling is
scrap, scrap their system. But I can see why they
absolutely keep UPS 1-2 and three.
Yeah. But even like you look at us
like it is broken. Me and you, we're both with 9
and 10 years in. So technically, technically, if
we had a pay rise every single year, we would both be on UPS 3
right now. Sure.
Neither of us on UPS. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
completely. So like, and I'd say I'm quite
bullshit like I've pushed for trying to move up to other
people probably 10 years in are still on M6.
Yeah, they've never moved into the upper threshold because.
They're scared of this. They're.
Scared of this like this sort of thing or they their school.
And I know this happened because I've literally had a
conversation with someone in the past who said I've been given
the option. I can't believe this is real.
Like thinking back right? Someone said to me I've been
given the option I'm on M6. I'm currently on M6 and I have a
TLR for leading a subject. If I go to UPS.
My head teacher said you can go to UPS but you won't get your
TLR anymore. So you can go to UPS 1.
You still need the subject as part of UPS but you won't get
your TLR. So it's the same money you still
and they convinced them as so you're still getting your TLR.
It's just embedded into your main pay now.
So it's no longer an extra thing we can take away.
It's now part that's the benefit mate.
It's no longer the next separate thing is part of your actual
main pay now. How good is that?
Hey, so take UPS one. And obviously they were just
like they took the UPS one. They took that option.
And then it's like, cool, there you go.
Well done. You manipulated your teacher
into going up. Literally just a point.
They deserve it. And you've taken away the extra
money and that's still doing the work.
And that's what they did. And at the time, I remember
being like, Oh my, not the two options.
Like they were both fair. Like they were the only things
that could possibly happen. Like, yeah, I agree.
I think you should do that one mentor.
I wish I could go back now and be like, no, go to your school
and be like, oh, that's actually not what UPS is for.
By the way, here's the freaking paperwork.
My my favourite one always with this is teacher standard 8.
I love going back to that because it's used so much and I
remember like you being young being NQT because it was that's
what it was called back then ECT Now and and my mentor literally
saying to me you should do the disco because it will make I
mean I can tick box 8. I just remember being like I I
at the time I was like sure. I look back now and I'm like,
you just need an extra pair of hands for the disco.
Yeah, that. Didn't take off.
Nothing. Nothing to do.
With me being a good teacher or not.
That has not contributed to where you are now.
Oh. Well, you're not.
Well, you've done you've done amazing assessment work and you
teach the kids really well. But you didn't go to disco, so
you can't you can't take off TSA.
Yeah. I love the, I love the sort of
retrospective like way of thinking where it's like, if you
didn't do that, would you still be where you are now?
Yeah, absolutely. What did it impact any?
Did it really impact any decision?
It did because I did some amazing nice lies and and those
kids were jealous, man. They were jealous.
That really helped me build a relationship with the children.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brilliant.
Anyway, well, the second-half of this episode is all about maths.
I'm really looking forward to talking about it.
Same, we've had our usual, you know, funny chit chat.
Now we're actually going to try and get semi serious I suppose.
And we are maths leads. So let's talk about teaching
really good math. You and I are maths leads.
In our school. We were trained as maths
specialists. Maths is our thing.
I think we're fair to say that, you know, sometimes we get an
expert on the podcast and we're like, cool, we're going to let
you talk about this because we just have opinions.
You're the expert. Yeah.
So I've got an. I've got an expert in for this.
It does. It's me, not you mate, it's just
me you know. Oh sorry, you're the one that
has a maths specialist on your. Degree, aren't you?
Yeah, but in all seriousness, you know, you've clicked on this
podcast because very much we're going to talk about teaching
maths and how to teach maths well.
And we're going to go for everything we've learned over
the years, what the purpose of teaching maths is, what a maths
lesson should look like, what we have to involve the kind of
actual bits around the curriculum, how do I make sure
there's progression and things like that, what good maths
teaching looks like, and just bits in general.
And we're going to try and get rid of some misconceptions.
That's a big part of this. We're going.
To squash some of those, That's what I was about to say.
That would be. That would be good.
So maths in general then, Hayden, what would you say is
the purpose in terms of your sat down?
You're a school teacher, you know, you've got to teach maths
very often. It's every single day.
It's a huge part of the curriculum.
Why is that? What is the purpose?
And the kid says to you, why do we learn this?
That's happened, that's happened.
And sometimes people know. The answer is the purpose of
teaching maths to me is what I would say to the children is
it's real world, it's real world skills, it's problem solving,
it's developing your brain. You're understanding how to
solve problems in the real world.
That's normally like the textbook response, like if the
children, would you add anything to that if you were talking to
an adult, perhaps that says why do we?
What is the real purpose? Yeah, I'd say from an adult's
point of view, a big part of your job when you're teaching
maths is to try and reduce the anxiety around the subject as
much as possible. You look at adults and I think
it's very normal for adults to say, oh, I don't do maths, I
don't do numbers. And no one bats an eyelid.
You know, if someone turned around and said oh, I don't do
reading, you would. It doesn't happen.
There's much more of a of course everyone reads and if you don't
then you feel really insecure about.
And we're not talking about just like choosing to read.
No, no, no. Yeah, I know.
I don't do reading. I can't read.
I can't read at all. I don't do exactly.
That like if you are illiterate, that's something where there's
like things in place, like no, everyone should aim to be
completely literate because it's really important.
With maths, there's definitely a much lower threshold and I think
that induces a bit of anxiety as a child, which leads to that
indifference when you're older. So if you're anxious about maths
when you're younger and you feel like you're failing when you're
older, you you will deal with that by suppressing and saying,
well, that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.
Well, when really in real life, do you know what it's so helpful
to have solid foundation on math skills and in primary schools
specifically is where we have to really nail those foundations as
much as possible. So I agree with everything you
said. It's all about the real word.
It's about the idea of solving problems.
We'll come on to that. But it is about just being able
to do maths, you know, work out your change.
How much money do you have to go shopping, what time is the bus,
you know, things like that. So do you think the curriculum,
the national curriculum is, is set out to do this?
Do you think it has the right aims?
I think, I think the aims of the national curriculum are really
good. Yeah.
I think if you just take that as a piece of paper on its own and
you read it, I don't think anyone would disagree with that.
I think we can talk through the aims.
Yeah. What are the aims?
So literally written in the national curriculum?
This is where the three parts of maths come from.
If you're a primary school teacher, you've done any maths
CPD you're you're thinking of OK, There's three parts of
maths, fluency, reasoning, problem solving and this it
comes directly from the aims of the curriculum.
So the aim of the curriculum, we'll start with fluency.
So the idea of fluency is practising things over and over
again, basically becoming good at maths, being able to do maths
and not only be able to do maths but to do that maths in
different circumstances and situations.
And, and we call that as a teacher very fluency.
So the aim is children are able to do maths.
That's basically the first name in.
English, right? When you say you're fluent in
English, I wouldn't say a kid is fluent in English because they
can write one single sentence structure over and over again,
right? It's about, OK, you can write
these words and you're fluent at the language and you can write
them in loads of different ways. And I think that's kind of what
you're getting out with this idea of varied fluency, right?
That's a really good analogy. And I think when you think about
if someone's fluent in English, do they know every single word
in the dictionary? No, no, of course not.
I'm fluent in English and I definitely don't know every
single word. I definitely something couldn't
write like Shakespeare, do you know what I mean?
But fluency is something that all children can achieve.
Yeah. In the same way fluency in
reading is something all children.
It doesn't mean you absolutely know everything to do maths
ever. You're completely fluent in
whatever. Yeah.
It means you've reached a threshold where, yeah, you can
add numbers together. Yeah, of course you can work out
how much time is left until the hour and things like that.
Fluency is an aim. And this is a name for all
children. If it's something that sometimes
gets missed, the idea is all children should be hitting these
aims. OK, and fluency.
I think that analogy of reading so.
Could just squash a little misconception then, because I
think it's very normal to think that fluency equals arithmetic
only, right? Is that right?
Is that wrong? Is there some truth in that?
I think a big part of fluency is what we do would call
arithmetic. Yeah, a big part of fluency is
can you add 2 numbers together? Can can you exchange?
Do you understand the process of doing that?
Can you get answers right repeatedly.
But it's more than arithmetic because it kind of bleeds in
these aims as we talk through the rest of them.
They believe leading with each other.
Because when we're talking about fluency, it might be that the
children can practise adding some numbers together, but then
it might move very quickly to, OK, well what about if the
missing, the missing number was at the start and then we have an
equal sign and then the addition.
That's part of fluency because it's about understanding that
still doing the maths, it's just in a slightly different context.
Sure, maybe there's a part hole model.
So for this time I'm missing the hole and then the two parts are
here, I'm going to have to put them together and I'm still
going to be doing the same maths.
I'm still going to be fluent in it.
I'm still reading the sentence in a different structure.
You're still teaching it to them on the, you know, on the screen
or on your board and they're then practising that exact skill
that you've done. That's fluency.
That's fluency is the building blocks of maths.
Yeah. You can't do the other aims of
the curriculum until you're fluent in something.
Yeah, you literally can't do it. So that's the first aim.
Children become fluent in their curriculum.
Yeah. Second aim, reasoning.
So reasoning is like the next step up.
So when we talk about reasoning, what we mean is we're talking
about being able to explain, being able to dive a little bit
deeper into thinking logically about something.
You can make connections, you can justify an answer, you can
extrapolate out and prove something.
So it's not just doing the math anymore, it's looking at
something and potentially saying how that went wrong, I think.
It's the most important part of the Quicken, by the way, because
I remember, you know, years ago when I, when we were at
university, I then went on to do my masters.
I'm just saying. And one of the big things that
was really interesting was looking at anxiety.
You know, you talk about anxiety of it was looking at that
generation above us who has tonnes of math anxiety in it
and, and one of the findings was that they just, they just, it
was very arithmetic based and rote based and not much about
the reasoning. It was kind of like, here's a
trick that helps you to answer this question.
The trick is completely abstract.
You have no conceptual understanding of what's going on
here. But if you do this trick, you
times those two together, you draw a :) under that one and
then you dot these two numbers and then you put the two dots
together like some weird trick, right?
If you draw a butterfly around the numbers then it works like
there's no no concept to understand.
They have no reasoning skills. So to me, like reasoning is like
the forefront of everything when I'm thinking about kids and
doing maths. Conceptual understanding hits
the nail on the head. It's going that one step
further. As a teacher, it's not just
spending the lesson adding two numbers.
I'm going to go to adding 'cause it's so simple.
It's not just a lesson adding two numbers together in
different ways. That's still fluency.
They're going to do it different ways, like it's presented
differently. It's in a parthole model.
It's in a bar model. Even in a word, problem can
still be fluency. It really can because you're
teaching it and you're just getting better at actually doing
the math. We'll come into problem solving
in a minute because I think that's a misconception we're
going to talk about. But yeah, conceptual
understanding that is reasoning. It's stopping and it's saying
what is this one worse? When we exchange over the one,
what we actually doing here, It's not one, is it?
Why it's 110? Well, why do we have 110?
Well, because we added the ones up and it bridged past 10.
So in 14 that four stays in the ones column.
And I've actually swapped those 10 ones for A10.
And it's the kind of thing that parents look at now and we
explain like why they're doing this modern maths, this rubbish
maths. I don't want to explain why am I
going to sit and write a sentence in maths?
I'm just going to do some adding.
No, no, the point is if you really have a solid grasp of
that exchanging when it comes to then doing short multiplication
or even short division and you're exchanging over 7,
sometimes literally the idea is, OK, I know that's 72 and I know
that's seven 10s. And that's going to help me
conceptually understand that idea of exchanging where when it
comes to doing short division and short multiplication,
etcetera. I as a teacher, don't need to
teach them this new trick because it's not just carrying
the one. If I, if I taught my kids just
put the one over, they, they have no idea.
It comes from the fact it's 14. They could.
Probably get the answer right in those exact questions, yeah.
Exactly. But they, but the, the IT just
enriches their understanding and, you know, it makes
connections like we're talking about with fluency and it just
embeds that lab. People always do that diagram.
Then it's, it's cliche, it's kind of cringy, the whole
foundation thing, like a pyramid sort of thing.
But it really is that genuinely, if you have a really bitty
foundation where you've not taught much of it, but you've
taught your kids tricks, it will fall down eventually.
And you will find later on, like you said, when you're teaching
other objectives, when they're not able to make those links, it
will be just as painful. Yeah, and I think you're
absolutely right. And and explaining it's a big
part. Language is a huge part of
reasoning. Explaining what's going on is
actually impossible for a child unless they've been taught the
vocabulary to do it. So don't expect reasoning to be
a quick fix. No, you can dip back into
reasoning and and if you're in year 4, for example, you can dip
back to a year three or a year 2 objective to get them really
explaining something they properly understand.
You've got to be able to do something first.
You've got to be able to exchange before you can explain
what exchanging is. So you really need to, like you
said, build up those blocks and things like sentence stems can
help children. Vocabulary word banks can really
help them. It's not something you're just
suddenly going to listen to this and go, OK, yeah, I need to do
more reasoning. Can you explain that?
Give them some questions. Yeah, they can't.
No, we had we had Gareth Metcalf on this on this podcast,
honestly, like a year ago, really, really good episode.
But he is someone I would if you want somewhere to start like a
quick easy win. He has resources called IC
reasoning as some other stuff as well.
And his resources are so good genuinely for that.
I remember using them earlier in my career as a teacher because
he he poses questions in a way where it's like, oh, hit some of
my favourite reasoning examples right are where you give kids a
fact you you give them OK, right, 18 * 5.
OK, you say it's 90 and then you say, and it's not about them
solving it. You just say, OK, explain how I
can do 19 * 5 without doing any formal multiplication.
Stuff like that to me is reasoning because it's like, OK,
do the kids really truly understand the concept of it's
18 lots of five or it's 5 lots of 18?
And how they could use the idea of lots of, if you're adding one
more lot of it's, it's repeated addition and it's linked to
that. And it's like, OK, if you taught
addition really well back in the time, back in the day when they
did that and they understand the repeated addition, well done.
You've now got an easier ride here.
And it goes back to that analogy of you're building a good
foundation. So the reasoning is just
constantly getting the kids to justify their understanding and
giving them new ways of looking at things.
So they really make a strong connection with the mouse that
they're learning to other parts of maths and also just a deep
conceptual understanding of that mouse, not just a surface level.
They can pass the test though. Do you know what don't care?
If you really care about the kids understanding mouse and
like the whole going back to the purpose being not being anxious
when they're older and solving real life problems, then you
have to care about that conceptual understanding just as
much as can they pass the test. That's it's such an amazing
analogy because I'm thinking right now of that has real life
connotations where where, for example, let's say you're
building something or measuring something in a room.
The idea of going back to scratch and showing you're
fluent in something isn't useful anymore.
You've already done a bunch of the maths.
Do you understand maths enough where you can just go, oh, jad
five that, that that link that is, that is completely different
to fluency. And if your child is only doing
fluency in their class, in their lessons for maths, they're never
ever going to make that link. And that's such a strong
indication to me. That's the perfect example of
reasoning, which because again, I think reasoning, sometimes
people just think, explain how you did that and that's that's
it. That's a type of reasoning.
But that's the only reasoning our children are getting that is
weak. Like if your reasoning is
literally just loads of loads of fluency in the lesson and at the
end saying, how did you do this? Oh, I added up the ones and then
I had a 10 and I exchanged it. That's cool.
There's a place for that. But your type of reason you just
said there is making links and connections and thinking things
through and justifying and proving like a big part of
reasoning isn't just explaining what you're doing, it's proving
why it worked. It's proving why someone's
wrong. And again, I do think we're
going to talk about assessment later, but when you look at the
Sats and the classic thought bubble questions they're doing
in your 6, quite often they are a bit like that.
You'll you'll have a question which is like so big they
couldn't possibly do it in their head like 398 * * 17 and they'll
say explain how you could work out 18 * 398.
Just flips it a bit and and that is that is pure reasoning and
children fail on that when they haven't remotely been exposed to
what you talking about like unless they have a really solid
understanding like you said, Yeah.
And I think for me, reasoning is sprinkled throughout every
lesson. Yeah, I like, I really do think
that reasoning is something that you you might not see on a
Tuesday if you walk in at 10:30 AM because it's not timetabled
in. We're not timetabled in
reasoning. And we'll talk about problem
solving, but it's reasoning is something where it just goes
hand in hand with fluency for me.
Yeah, that idea of just you, you couldn't you, you can only
become fluent in something as you're becoming able to explain
something. And it is, that was reasoning I
think comes after fluency. I do think during it you're kind
of moulding it together into a ball.
It's funny, isn't it? Because, because more often
we'll talk about problem solving now more oftenly it gets banded.
Fluency is very separate and it gets banded reasoning and
problem solving. And I think I certainly at the
start of my career, for years, I'd say genuinely, if you ask me
what's the difference between reasoning and problem solving, I
wouldn't have now to tell you. I really did just think they
were the same thing and they were just kind of like a term
that's been put together of them.
So what? What is?
Let's talk about problem solving.
Then what is problem solving? And you know, I'm sure you'll
make it obvious when you're talking, but why is it different
to this idea of reasoning, conceptual understanding?
Well, I think, OK, let's, let's just really go over what we just
said because I think it's important to understand problem
solving, that fluency and reasoning to me are two sides of
the same coin. I, I really do think in my head,
as I've become more adept at teaching maths, reasoning has
moved much closer to problem solving in my head.
And it's just something you're constantly doing.
I, I do think that you could at most lessons walk into a room
and at some point, at least if it's just partner talk, even if
you're introducing something for the first time and really
looking at the very fluency idea, there's going to be
reasoning built in if it's being taught really well.
In my opinion, I think the way I can justify how problem solving
is different. I think you could come into my
classroom one or two or three days in a row and not
necessarily see any problem solving.
I think problem solving is the end goal.
I think, I think problem solving is incredibly important.
I think it's where everyone should aim to be, where your
children are becoming problem solvers.
And I don't think it matters how good the children are at maths,
their aim has to be to be problem solvers at whatever
level they're working at. OK, so problem solving to me,
and I think this is a widely accepted definition of problem
solving, is being able to apply skills you've built up
mathematically to unfamiliar problems.
That's the keyword, isn't it? That's the.
Keyword. It's only problem solving if the
children are not familiar with what they've got in front.
Give me a classic example of what's not problem solving.
Then what's the most common thing where people say this is
problem solving and it is I'm. Going to put two things in one
here, OK? And I really don't want to dig
out people who do this because I did this for many years of my
career. I can completely understand why
people do it and I think there's room for it again.
But I don't think it's very good practise and neither do Ofsted.
And I think when we're thinking about applying the curriculum,
it's something we should try and avoid now as we become more
proficient at understanding what's going on.
I don't like seeing word problem Fridays.
This, this was a big thing, problem solving Friday, word
problem Friday. And and that whole idea was, it
was to try and shoehorn in some problem solving.
So he took the make sure it's happening fine.
Brilliant. Bad practise in my opinion.
So what you might often see people say is problem solving
is, well, it's in a word problem, it's problem solving.
It's not true. OK, The biggest thing I I did
this at the start of my career so I'm going to talk about
myself here. So I'm digging myself out.
Before anyone gets annoyed at me if you did this as well, maybe
we should just think about it together.
I used to do my maths lesson. I'd do some fluency, what I
thought was fluency, like maybe do some practise 3 different
ways of showing it called. Then I'd do a question after
which says explain how this person did this wrong and to me
that was my reasoning. Take that off and then my
challenge always would just put it as my challenge.
Every day. I'm going to think of a problem
solving 1 here because the kids who finish can get into the
problem solving and the problem solving question is just a 2
step word problem where they just do what they did at the
start of the lesson in the context of a word problem.
Oh, and by the way, one of my slides and my input was this
word problem with different numbers.
So many reasons why it's not problem solving.
If you've literally shown the children the structure of a word
problem and how to solve it and just change the number, by
definition, it's not unfamiliar anymore.
It's just them regurgitating what?
There's no problem solving involved.
Yeah, sure. OK.
And the second thing is every child should be doing problem
solving. So if your problem solving is in
your challenge or what you say is your problem solving, by
definition, not everyone's going to get to the challenge as it
wouldn't be that it's extra work for children to do well and
you're depriving your children who are struggling a bit more
the chance to problems. OK, I'm.
Going to hit you back then with a common response to that, but
my kids that are struggling aren't fluent enough to do the
problem solving in that lesson yet.
Yeah. So again, what we say to our
staff and I think it's really important to make this clear to
your staff and I don't think you're a bad maths teacher if
you think that. I think that's a very.
I think it's a logical thing. Because you know what you cannot
problem solve until you can do the maths.
I completely agree with you. So I'd say to this person,
you're absolutely right, what we need to do is building time for
these children to be doing some problem solving on age
appropriate level of maths for them.
So let's say they're in year 4 and they're working at a year 2
level and you say they can't, they can't, they don't access
this year 4 curriculum. How can they possibly problem
solve? They're still becoming fluent.
I'd say you're right, it'll be a waste of time to give them
problem. Solve.
Give them year 4 problem solving questions.
So go to year 2, you know, can can your child add 7 past 10?
Can they, can they do like 8 + 7?
OK. And you'll be like, yeah, sure.
They, they can use a number line and they can use A10 square
there and they can go past and they can do that.
OK, cool. Here's a Bank of year two
problem solving questions for additional retraction.
There'll be something in there where they can do the maths and
then all their focus is on problem solving.
So I would say to them, look, everyone needs to problem solve.
It just needs to be problem solving something they're fluent
in. If they're not quite fluent in
it yet, don't do problem solving.
And that's what I mean when I say even your children who are
in your year group on the Year 4 curriculum, in this case, in
Year 4 class, they still might not be ready to problem solve
after one lesson. It's OK to not see it.
You might see problem solving on a Tuesday.
Yeah. And then you might see it again
on a Thursday. Yeah.
You might not see it till the Friday after.
Yeah, It has to be appropriate. When we had Ofsted in one of the
one of the big things, we were doing a lot of research at the
time. I think it was from like Third
space learning or something like that put together.
Reference in a second. Oh, brilliant.
Well, the the the the condensed version of the Ofsted.
OK, so. No, no, no, no.
I'm going to reference something else first.
Space learning is fantastic. It's a different thing, but
they've got so much stuff. Well, they'd they'd read all the
obstet. There was tonnes of obstet
guidance about how they want to see mouse write their deep dives
and all this stuff, and they put it into a nice document to read.
I remember one of the big things was like the do's and don'ts
list. It was Ofsted will.
It will be like a red flag to them if they see that you've
planned Robin problem solving into every single lesson and in
like on the surface that sounds like what what they're talking
about. And it's the reason it's a red
flag is because it honestly, it's so like based on everything
Dylan just said, by definition, then it's very, very, very hard
to get to have your kids constantly fluent in every
single thing you're teaching ever in every lesson that they
can do problem solving immediately in that lesson.
It's not going to happen. It realistically won't happen.
It might take a few days of building up that fluency and
reasoning together before you can say, right, I think you've,
I think it's there. I think you are fluent enough
that I can give you an unfamiliar problem.
And you're going to be able to pull those though that all that
new learning to the forefront of your brain and combine it all
together to solve this problem. I couldn't have done that
yesterday because honestly, you just weren't there yet.
You just were not fluent enough. It would have been confusing.
You would have then developed anxiety around this.
It would have been a fail. So yeah, it was interesting that
Ofsted actively went out of the way to be like, this is not a
good thing. Like schools need to stop saying
to their teachers. We need to see problem solving
every single day. And then everyone does the
challenge question that you said.
It's just a misconception. So we talked about how it's not
just necessarily word problems we talked about we don't
necessarily need to see every day.
And I think I'm going to pick up what you said there about how
you need to be fluent before you can do problem solving.
And the idea is that if you're fluent in the mass, you've got
one less thing to cognitively load in your mind through.
So when it comes to problem solving, you can spend a lot of
the time on actually problem solving.
OK. And, and trying to diagnose what
to do with this problem. Yeah.
And again, I'm going to reference Third Space Learning.
They put together this PDF and it like, for years now, I've had
it printed off. And I just keep it in my mind
constantly. I'm thinking about this.
And it's the nine ways of tackling a problem.
Oh. Yeah, cool.
And it's and we'll go for it now, because lots of people were
listening to this like I was a few years ago when I had my mind
opened to what problem solving actually was.
And I remember just thinking to myself, OK, well, OK, well if
it's not word problem and stuff, well what is problem?
What? Is it?
Tell me what it is so. Problem solving.
We should be thinking about it as in focusing on the skills
required to solve a problem. Sure not.
Here's a problem, here's how it works.
Apply it with different numbers. Not problem solving.
Problem solving, it's so vague, it's hard, but if you focus on
the skills involved, you can make sure your children have
like a wide diet of problem solving.
And I'm going to go through it all nine right here and
technique. And I'm going to give an example
of what it might look like. OK, so I'm going to talk about
first technique. One, open-ended problems.
This can be a problem in itself, just literally an open-ended
problem. For example, an example of this
would be you might be doing you've just done some error in
perimeter. You're like at the end of that
unit. Now you think your children are
really solid with error in perimeter.
They understand what the words mean, what they are you can say
to okay, the area of a rectangle is 24 centimetres squared.
What are the length of its sides?
Okay, so there's not one answer. There's not one answer.
Not one answer. Yeah.
So as as a teacher then you know they're proficient with what
area is, they know that you know they can draw a rectangle out,
they know opposite sides and a rectangle the same.
All of that base knowledge is there.
Their entire focus, then, is on trying things out.
Open-ended, more than one option.
This is a good example of where reasoning and problem solving do
join up and it's really is a perfect example.
OK, that is where a child now reasoning is this floater in the
middle where generally it's we teach it with fluency.
That's a good example where they're using both.
They have to reason, they have to explain why there's multiple
answers. They have to explain why.
Well, if I half this side, this one might double that.
Got like that kind of thing. But it's a problem because as a
teacher, you should be building in an environment where they
haven't seen this question before.
They don't know. They've got no tangible way of
like, well, Sir showed me a minute ago to draw a rectangle.
No, no, let them try it out themselves.
That is the art of problem solving.
And why is it important? Not because in a test they're
going to, this is going to come up again, by definition.
It's unfamiliar by definition. So it's not teaching to a test.
This is why it gets so warped. It gets so warped into being A2
mark question, I might say on the SAT, that's your problem
solving. No, it's not though, is it?
Problem solving is literally by definition something that they
won't see before and won't necessarily see again.
In that context, yeah. Good.
What's the next? One, use logical reasoning.
So by this I mean I'm thinking of those word riddles where it's
like 1 cinema has X amount of people in it and the other
cinema has 13 fewer. Cinema 4 has half the amount of
cinema 2 and and they're getting this, all this information and
you've got to try and organise it.
Be logical. What comes ahead of what?
Yeah. And and that idea of just being
logical itself, it's not in the curriculum.
It might be that the third line Cinema 3 is your kind of start
point because it tells you Cinema 3 has 50 receipts or
whatever and they're like, OK, now I know that I can go back to
line one because that told me that Cinema one has half of
Cinema 3 and then come on, I know that one.
I can then work out four and then I can find the total.
And what you can sprinkle in with these questions is whilst
it's still problem solving, you can sprinkle in what you've
recently done. If you've recently done
multiples, have it twice as much, 7 times as much, half as
much. If you've done halving that
stuff, you can basically tail your your problem solving to
have maths in it that your children have become fluent in
to really then focus on the idea of OK, being logical and still
applying what they've done, still doing maths that's
relevant to the curriculum. Next one, working backwards.
Think about those inverse machines you get.
But it might be written in words this time.
So you might say Sally's just had her birthday.
She's three years younger than Pete, and Pete's half the age of
Bob. Bob just celebrated his 42nd
birthday. Yeah, you know, work backwards
to get back to the original age. Exactly.
It's. Different because there's one
linear way of getting there, but how the children are going to do
that? They're going to do one at a
time. Have you just done inverse
together? Can I take a really good example
of this in year 6 as a year 6 teacher, I see it every single
year and it's such a good way of me understanding whether a child
understands fractions of amounts properly.
Fractions of amounts is a year 4 objective if you're not too sure
of that. So by year six, we do kind of
expect this to be fairly confident and fluent with that,
right? And as soon as I give even like
a top set, if we, if you're doing setting maths Group A
question that's like 1/3 of a number is 12 or even harder, 3/4
of a number is 12. What was the original number?
That's that kind of idea. That to me is such a good
problem to give a kid once they've become fluent in finding
fractions of amounts, because it really requires them to think
about their conceptual understanding.
And if you've just taught them a trick, divide by the denominator
times by the top and you've never ever, ever showed them
anything else, right? They just know that that trick
works. They will not know how to solve
that problem. And again, I'm going to whizz
through the rest now because we're going to link down below
the document. It's well worth reading if you
want to look into. Problems do like a really quick
example. But yeah, for example, there
that. But what I'm saying here is the
different techniques we're going to talk about and I'm going to
whizz through now can be used multiple for one question.
So you're talking about there it's kind of like inverse
working backwards understanding something.
I'd also say in that case, technique 4, for example, is
draw a diagram. Yeah, I'd be drawing a diagram
now. I'd be drawing the quarters out.
I'd be doing a bar model if it's necessary.
Do you know what I mean? So it's not just like these
techniques we're talking about here.
They're not just like pick one and do it.
It's like a bookshelf. You might take 3 and you need.
Some models is your overall point here is we can teach these
individual skills and once we've taught all nine of these skills,
yes, they'll be better at problem solving with genuine
unfamiliar because. Then it's completely unfamiliar.
They might say, well OK, I'll try for example technique 9,
trial and improvement. I'll let you just whack a number
and see if it works. That could work for the inverse
machine working backwards. They might try and work
backwards. That doesn't quite work for
them. OK, well my teachers taught me
all these techniques to problem solving.
Let me try just putting a number in and the whole point here is
if they become proficient in these different techniques of
problem solving, again, click on the link for the rest of them
because there's few in there. Drawing a table be an organised
spotting a pattern. The idea is that's a that's a
tool book. Then for them, not only can they
solve problems in class when they're older, think of all of
these things here. If you can visualise stuff well,
if you can try something out. The amount of times we use trial
improvement in everyday life, honestly all the time, and we're
estimating things and we go shopping and we say things be
this much roughly and we don't work in exacts all the time, but
it's problem solving. Same with a rough ballpark.
Can I draw a table out? Can I Draw Something out if I'm
trying to understand something? I love getting a piece of paper
and just drawing stuff and then that for me in my brain solves
that problem because I can see it differently.
So the point here is problem solving is the most important
part of the curriculum. You're building a toolbox for
life. When someone says why, Why in
school do they teach me about 24 centimetres squared and what the
perimeter would be? Why don't they teach me about my
taxes? They did teach you about your
taxes because they taught you the maths and they taught you
how to problem solve. I can't.
It's like the history degree thing.
When people come to me and say you've got a history degree,
have you? I bet you do you know everything
ever. No they they didn't teach me
everything ever. You could pick something up.
Why did you teach me exactly this about African history but
in pre colonial times? Because that's what I chose to
do. But you know what I learnt?
I learnt the. Skills how to research of.
How to research of how to take bias into account, how to go to
the library, how to interpret sources.
It's so true. How to write an essay.
Those skills. Now I could pick up and apply to
19th century Hungary if I wanted to, but I built those skills up.
So if someone comes to me and say, why didn't they teach you
about this and your history degree?
They didn't need to. They taught me the skills
required to be able to learn about it.
Same with your taxes. Same with your other things.
Look, I think there's space for stuff like that in the
curriculum when they're older. Don't get me wrong, but it winds
me up a bit when people say they didn't teach me this exact
thing. No, because it's a process.
And that's why the aims of the maths curriculum are fluency,
reasoning and problem solving. And it's why if you look at the
purpose of the maths curriculum, it is embedded in real life
problem solving. Because we can't teach you how
to do everything. Because when you're 8 you don't
quite understand compound interest and how to invest or
how to do your income returns. But what you can do is start to
learn how to do trial improvement, start to learn how
to understand something, start to learn how to draw a picture
to get something in your mind a bit clearer.
These are the problem solving skills that allow mathematicians
to grow and interpret the real world.
Yeah, yeah, but in English, Sir. Same thing in English, Sir.
Why did you teach me specifically how to do this
newspaper report? I want to write books.
So what? We didn't, did we?
We actually taught you loads of different writing skills.
We applied them in some examples.
And now you've got this whole plethora, this whole Bank of
vocabulary, sentence structures, different types of writing,
formality. You can go and apply it to
anything you want. It's the same sort of thing,
isn't it? Exactly.
I think it links to English more than I realised.
The more we talk about it let's you know the whole idea again,
kind of independent writing. It's like you don't, you don't.
You said problem solving is not putting it on the screen,
showing them how to do it, give them different numbers.
Do you know what independent writing isn't?
It isn't giving them the writing on the screen and then saying
right, replace all the adjectives.
Now it's your writing. It's not, is it?
It's actually about building up the fluency over a couple of
weeks, perhaps building up the skills, giving them everything
they need to know, showing the modelling, modelling, modelling
along the way and then saying here's an unfamiliar environment
because it's a brand new piece of writing.
Can you write me about this now and seeing if they can apply it
and can they apply it straight away?
No, not always, but you know what?
They're at school for years. You come back to it, you
revisit, you revisit, you revisit.
So I think we should now talk about how we actually structure
the curriculum. I know we're already going on
way into this episode, so we might have to cut some stuff
here, Dylan, but I feel like we should talk about, I really want
to talk about like, like, like the scheme, like the overview,
how you how you look at maths, because there's two massive
parts of maths, which I think are like long rivals and people
always argue about them. The types of curriculum, I
should say, which is should we teach maths in a block
curriculum or a spiral curriculum?
And let me just clarify what those are.
So a spiral curriculum is this idea that you kind of you, you
revisit, typically you revisit the whole curriculum three times
across the year. You sort of go over everything
up to Christmas and you kind of go over it all again after that.
You kind of go over it all again before summer.
So they're constantly coming back to it, which is a really
good concept I get. And the block curriculum is this
idea of like, no, rather than doing a bit of addition now and
a bit of addition after Christmas and a bit of addition
in June, I'm just going to teach every single edition objective
right now in a massive block. And I'm not then going to teach
that as my main objective again for the rest of the year.
So let's talk about those two things.
What are your, I feel like you're the expert today.
I'm, I'm really enjoying listening to you, even though
I've heard all this stuff before.
What's your opinion on the spiral curriculum versus the
block curriculum? Do you have a favourite or do
you think there's just a whole new perspective we need to take?
So I, I've been on like a roller coaster journey with my opinion
on this because when I started out, I, I, I started out my
teaching after the new curriculum came in and it was
like mastery push block teaching's the way to go.
You should block, teach, blah, blah, blah.
And I thought that for a long time.
Then I came round to it like, well, do you know, it's maybe in
10 years we'll say Spiral's the best way again and come back to
it. And my opinion for a long time
was, do you know what? It doesn't really matter as long
as you're doing it this year, as long as you're going to have
started it, it's cool. I've actually come back around
to, I'm happy to sit here and say I think block teaching is
better. I'm happy to sit here and say
that it comes with a caveat. I was.
Going to say are there any like it?
Does come with a caveat because I I completely agree when people
say it's insanely idea. If you think about place value,
for example, doing block teaching in Year 4, we do place
value for two or three weeks in September and then it's not on
the curriculum again. Until the next year.
Yeah. Do you really think a good maths
teacher will only do place value for three weeks and a year at
the start and then just expect a child to understand it?
What and? And never mention it again.
Exactly. No, that's not what happens.
So I think what I think in terms of teaching new things and
really going down that route of reasoning and fluency and then
the chance to do some problem solving, I think you can only
really do that in a block. Yeah, OK.
You can really have two or three weeks to get into it and then
you don't have have to worry about shoehorning in problem
solving because you know you've got to move on to something else
next week. You've got two weeks.
Why don't you think you can do it as spiral as well I.
Think, I think you can do it as spiral, but I think you'd be
rushing. I think I'm thinking about,
let's say we're doing additional subtraction for a week in before
Christmas and then a week before Eastern, a week at the end,
right? Let's just say it's three weeks
or four weeks. I think you're really rushing
then at the start to cover everything, OK, You'll be doing
at such a surface level that the children don't get that chance
to reason and problem solve and really embed that learning into
their long term memory. I think you kind of just skim
over it. Kids kind of get it, they can
kind of do it and they're caught.
I don't have to go over this again because I'm doing it in
three months and it becomes like this false sense of, well, I'm
coming back to it, so it's fine. And then in three months,
ironically, they've forgotten. They've forgotten more than they
would have forgotten if you literally did it the week after.
So then you're revisiting things that maybe you wouldn't have had
to have done if you were literally teaching that week,
the week after the first time you did it.
I agree. For me, it's like this graph
that kind of goes up and dips down a little bit because you've
left it too long. They were starting to get it.
They were starting to get. They just needed another week or
two to really master. And that's the whole quick one,
isn't it? Mastery.
Yeah, I think what's important though to say is I think you
have to build in time to revisit stuff.
You don't have to do whole lessons on it, but you have to
build in time. For example, this is what we've
done. We've been really strict of this
in our school. Maths is almost split into two.
OK, so maths we have, let me think of the exact timings.
We have an hour and 15 minutes for maths and what we say to
people is 20 to 25 minutes every single morning is for your times
table, your basic facts and you're revisiting your
recapping, going over stuff or pre teaching, which we call it
sounds like a lot. A starter time.
It's called starter time, but it's mixed starter time and it
doesn't have to have anything to do with your lesson that day.
It is literally like a separate lesson.
So in that time you might think, do you know what?
It's been a couple of weeks. We did addition for three weeks.
They're really good at it, but I want to keep this ticking over.
So on Tuesday this week we're going to do like a 10 minute bit
on on an addition of subtraction.
Yeah. Oh, actually my children were
really fluent with what we did last week.
We've moved on to area now, but I can give them a problem to
solve, that's where. Problem solve they can apply.
Fluid. Let's see if they can apply
exactly that. Let's do some problem solving.
Nothing to do today's lesson, but I'm going to do some problem
solving for something I think they're fluent in that we've
just done. Then on Friday you might think,
OK, well, actually in the future, I know, I know coming up
in area, I actually really want to be really strong with their
factor pairs and their understanding of times tables.
So I'm going to really focus on the seven times table because my
class were weak with that and it's going to help them in the
future and it helps them with the times tables.
It can look scattered. It could look crazy to someone
coming in. There's no coherence there in
terms of from the outside, but as the teacher with your class,
you're doing what they need. So the other year 4 class, the
other year 4 class parallel, I would expect to see different
starters. Maybe 80% could be the same,
don't get me wrong, but I would expect to see, oh gosh, you know
what, my class, I just want to go over this again.
So and then when it comes to the lesson themselves, that's block
teaching, that's getting right into the nitty gritty, sticking
your teeth into it, getting them to be really fluent through
reasoning and through very fluency and then problem solving
irrelevant or use your starter time when they become fluent.
Sure. Can I try and summarise what you
said and you can tell me if I've missed anything?
So I think what you're saying here is it's a bit of a cop out
really. It's bit both, isn't it?
When it comes to teaching, teaching the main objectives of
of your lesson, especially with new learning.
We should teach in blocks, allow children to master that
objective before we move on with as much time as possible.
But we should reserve a time in lessons that is sacred for
revisiting. We call it starters.
And that very much adopts a spiral approach of there is no
set rule. You revisit things as much as
you wish, as often as you wish or as little as you wish.
But everything should be revisited across the year to
ensure that children are remembering the learning and
having a go and having a chance to correct things if they didn't
actually quite get it at the time and even just solidify or
even go further with a bit of problem solving.
So the spiral curriculum is embedded into our block
curriculum. It's a bit of both.
There's not one or the other. Yeah.
Interesting. I think, I think in that we can
talk about whole times tables because I think especially lower
down in the school when you learn your times tables, you can
use that time to just practise. Don't be scared of rote
learning. You wanted to talk very I think
about the whole thing about the lesson structure and diving into
new learning. The reason block works well is
because it allows a slower approach.
It allows you to go into what we are widely accepted for new
learning and maths is is the best way to do it.
Is the CPA approach the concrete pictorial abstract?
Maybe you could briefly just talk about what you'd expect to
see in a good maths lesson, introducing a new topic.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. What would it look like?
So. Let's let's break down some
misconceptions as well as we talk.
So concrete pictorial abstract, you will have heard if you're a
teacher, it's it was especially over the last decade, it's been
a buzzword. It's the idea.
And this is what this is what it's really used for.
It's not if your school has an approach of every lesson, I want
to see some concrete resources out for your lower ability.
I want to see some pictorial stuff for your middles, and I
want your tops working in the abstract.
That is not. What concrete pictorial abstract
process is that This is what it really is.
When a child, any child, any ability, learns something brand
new. They've never looked at this
objective before in a previous year.
You should start in the concrete.
What do you mean by the? Concrete, so physical.
The physical world, something you can touch, something you can
manipulate. That's what we call the
manipulators, manipulatives. Manipulatives.
Quite often I can't speak, but things like Deans, blocks,
counters, those kinds of things, they're all manipulatives that
you can hold, and I try. And manipulate you.
Are you a manipulative? I'm manipulate, manipulatable.
That's malleable, hard words. No, no, no, no, no.
Make it harder, but. Yeah, sorry, you said.
So you start is. Anything manipulative.
I'm just I'm interested here. Like what what?
What do you mean by? Honestly, literally anything
that helps understand the concept.
Genuinely anything. It doesn't have to be something
you bought on the teacher website.
That's like, all these blocks are perfect.
It can be anything. You can bring in something from
home, be cups if they're useful for what you're doing, whatever.
And then because you're teaching them the concept at that point,
the idea is you're allowing them to build conceptual
understanding in the easiest way, which is the real world.
You know, you don't go up to a person that's learning like a 2
year old. You don't go up to them and the
first time they've ever, ever had any encounter with a tree,
You don't show them the word tree, do you?
You go up to a tree in real life and you let them touch it and
you say tree, This is a tree, right?
And then eventually, do you know what?
Once, once they really start to get the idea, you can show them
a picture of a tree and they'll start to be like, Oh, that's
that thing that I've seen in real life, because obviously the
real life makes my sense to me. And then eventually you can say,
here's these random squiggles that we've made-up that
represent this idea of tree mass is the same.
So getting them to the squiggles, the numbers at the
end, yeah. So when when with Rory, I want
to teach what a lion is, I should take them up to a lion
that's concrete. Let him touch the.
Lion right, Let him feel the inside of the lions mouth.
Lion sharply. Then can I show him a picture?
Yeah, OK, alright, maybe he doesn't have to touch the lion.
You know what, you're joking. But there is actually a really
good point here, which is you can quite often start in the
pictorial genuinely there. There is a middle ground where
some things. It's a journey.
And you could, yeah. It's a journey and it's quite
often you could if it's something is so obvious, like
the lines gonna eat like like this.
Manipulative Will bio. You know like classic reception
right where they do they will use like apples when they apples
that do you know what they don't need real apples.
They might have counters to represent the apples to so they
can physically move something. They can understand the idea of
the number, but you know what the apple is just something so.
Even in the concrete though, right?
Even in the concrete there is also progression.
So you think like Dean's blocks, like physically there's one
small block, physically there's a 10 which is literally 10 times
bigger. Then there's 100, which is
literally 10 times bigger and you can get ten 10s and see it's
100. So that's something you could do
with honestly your three children, even your two children
with the ones you might do if your receptions and you're just
counting and stuff. But then there's still
progression there because still with the concrete is you think
about place fire counters where they have a one written on them
and a 10 written on them. And I've said this for a long
time, I think counters are closer to pictorial than they
are to concrete. And, and there'll be people who
though who'll say concrete, pictorial, abstract, let's get
the counters out first. I'm like, oh, OK, actually, why
are you getting the concrete out?
It's because it's new learning. Do they understand the relation
between? One and two, my answer to this
is every time that is, and I think this is valid, is that
both of them are do their new learning in different ways.
Exactly When you're getting out the Deans blocks, the new
learning is honestly them literally understanding the
relationships between sizes of numbers, knowing that 10 is 10
times bigger than one and that's what 10 times bigger looks like
when you're at the counter stage.
It's them understanding that in place value we exchange.
So is it so with most year five and six children, for example,
you wouldn't necessarily feel that you need to get the Deans
out? No, most of the time.
Most of the time if I'm children working out there, if I had a
child working year one level in year 6, I'd absolutely be
getting them out, of course, but most of the time, not at all.
So a new concept, you know, a new concept in year 6 might be
multiplying fractions together. Sure.
And I think it is valid to start in the pictorial of this and
show them an array, right? You know, with multiplication,
like with area, we'd show them 7 * 4, We'd show them 7 rows of
four, right? I would get, I would get a
rectangle out and I'd say, OK, we're doing, we know how
multiplication works. We know it labels these two
sides and we know it's linked to area.
OK, we've got 3/4 * 1/2. How are we going to do that?
How we can label it? OK, cool, let's cut it.
Let's cut this one into 1/2. So we've got two rows.
Let's cut this one into columns, sorry.
And let's cut this one into 4 rows because we're showing
quarters. And then we can use shading to
show 3/4 of 1/2 like let's just take 1/2 and let's just do 3/4
of like you can. You can do because.
There are people who think year 6 cool, you're in the abstract
now because this journey, CPA is just.
Free, not at all, right? Even with my even with even with
a top set mass in year 6, I will still use the pictorial with new
learning and you know what? I might do it for 5 minutes
because you know what? Because that because that level
of that ability child very quickly goes oh, it always
happens that you multiply the numerators and the denominators
because that's how you end up shading that bit in.
Can we just do that? And I'm like, yeah, that's why
it works. You've got the concept now crack
on. You've got it.
So going back to what we said earlier about solving mass
anxiety and anxiousness and this whole generation of just like,
why are you doing this? There's new maths.
It's nonsense. By the way, I'm still scared of
doing maths myself. Listen, it's not their fault,
OK? I know I'm acting quite glib
about it, but there is like meaning behind this.
So when you're as a teacher thinking why am I bothering?
No, there honestly, there is meaning behind this because when
the children make those connections, when they see it in
front of them, when you're facilitating that for them, they
will understand things more. They will be less anxious when
they're older. They won't be as flippant about
it because it's not something they're worried about.
Yeah, but Dylan, they're not gonna get those Dean blocks in
that test, though, are they? OK, OK.
All right, OK. I see what you're doing here.
Let's let's let's round this off talk about assessment.
We could be here all day talking about, I'm hoping just a quick
breather here that you're getting the impression of how
passionate we are about maths and things like that.
We absolutely love it and there's a reason why we're maths
specialists and need maths. So I hope you found this useful.
Let's finish off with assessment because I think there's going to
be a dose of realism here as well.
Assessment is weird, OK, It's weird.
It's it's weird. It is the end of my discussion.
Assessment is so odd. Let's break it down into the two
types of assessment. Formative assessment is what
goes on every single minute of the day.
As a teacher, you're constantly looking for feedback from the
children to see how they're getting on the most, in my
opinion, crucial form of assessment that I think defines
you as a good teacher or not genuine.
I'd say it's that important. That's what This is why
assessment's weird. I think that is the most
important thing. Genuinely how you react to what?
You're picking up when you're teaching.
What you're picking up, how you adapt to them when we talked
about teacher standards and adaptation, I think that is
where you earn your salt as a teacher when you can't just go
off the slides and stuff. You know, anyone can get a
scheme up. It's when you're adapting stuff,
OK. And and that comes in with being
a good maths teacher in general, by the way you adapt things for
your class. You know, pitch and pace has to
be different. Your pitch might be higher
because you formatively have assessed the children are
better. The pitch might you have to slow
down in the lesson because you think, well, these kids don't
get this. The pace, OK, we're going to be
quicker. We're going to do this small
step in half a lesson. Oh gosh, I didn't get this.
Let's do it again tomorrow. So that that this is all comes
on the formative assessment and that's what good maths teaching
looks like. You adapt the scheme that you've
got in front of you. You don't just take it as
gospel. The progression brilliant, use
it. But your pitch and your pace is
what you're changing. That's formative assessment to
me. OK, we'll go into what's The
other one, then. About that, maybe in a second.
The other one is summative OK and summative assessment is them
sitting down for a formal test. Honestly, I'm someone who said I
think the SAT should be kept and I like the idea of the SAT
because it gives a benchmark. I still agree with that opinion.
I still haven't changed my mind on that.
I think about a child's journey through school year 12345 and
six. I think about them doing 3 tests
a year at every single year group just for the data for the
school. I think most of the time it's a
waste of time. Yeah, yeah, big time if you've
actually add up that amount of time, right.
If you really think about it, I always get so annoyed when we do
an assessment week genuinely because I'm like, oh, that's
three more lessons of, of teaching maths that I'm not
going to give those kids so. Context for you.
You're six teachers, for example.
It's hot enough to the Sats. The Sats are looming over
schools. You've got to get good scores.
It's seen as very normal to do 3 or 4 past Sats papers in test
conditions, very much like the real thing.
Yeah, pretty much. You think I think 1's good
because I think familiarity is a different subject, is a
different thing. I think it's good to make the
kids familiar so they're again, not as anxious about how the
tests are going to be, what they're going to feel like and
look like. But it's a waste of time to me
because you know what, I never really learned anything from
them. People say, oh, you can do a gap
analysis. Listen, half the gap analysis on
a summative assessment, unless it's literally the end of the
year, is stuff you haven't even taught them anyway.
They can't do that. I know they can't do, I haven't
taught them yet, don't need to know that.
And now they just feel rubbish. They got tonnes of questions
wrong. How many times?
Let's talk about that for a second, because when you do that
first Test of the year, every teacher will know this.
OK, Again, I'm using year 4 because I'm in year 4.
We do a year 4 test after like 5 weeks, right?
And it's just an end of year. It's just a curriculum test.
It's a year 4 curriculum test. So there's fractions on there.
We're not touching fractions until Easter.
Yeah. That's the nature of the block.
Yeah. OK.
These tests, I feel like, were made for the spiral curriculum.
Yeah. OK, let's have term one.
Let's cover everything. Let's see where they are.
Wow, that gap analysis is actually quite useful because
all of my kids have got 95 plus in the distance subtraction.
So when I revisit that, I'll maybe do one lesson instead of a
whole week. And that means I can do more on
the fractions, which they got 20% on, but I've still done
fractions. So this is kind of useful
information. I don't feel like assessments
caught up with the block way of teaching.
Okay, well, counter argument to this straight away from a
leader, head of school sort of perspective is it allows them to
track progress though. Because if you give them three
end of year tests, it's one at the start of the year, one in
the middle, one at the end, you can very easily.
If the tests are all the same standard, you can track
progress, right? You can.
OK. All I'd say to that is why are
you doing that? Like, honestly, what's the
purpose? It's not for the kids, is it?
Let's not ever pretend it's for the kids because it's not.
Is it for the teachers? Do you know what my gap is,
though? Quickly for the kids?
My gap is what I haven't taught yet.
So I'm not changing. I'm not going to teach that in
in in March. I'm teaching that, so I'm not
going to change that now, but. Can you argue some?
Some of the gaps will be things you have taught though, right?
Potentially. But you know what?
That's where formative assessment comes in.
Yeah, you know, honestly, right. It says my kids can't do column
method subtraction properly because they've got gaps in
their test. If I didn't know that from
teaching it to them for three weeks, then that's a problem.
If they can do it and they didn't do it on the test, it's
kind of good to know, but I know they can do it.
So all we're actually seeing is how the kids perform on a test.
Yeah, that's all we're actually testing here.
So let's get real then and stop pretending it's something
different because it's for the school to track data to be able
to say, oh, my teachers are teaching well because they're
just delivering the curriculum and they're getting higher
scores. You could deliver the curriculum
completely averagely and your scores would go up just based on
coverage. There's notification of how good
you're doing. There's a lot more nuance to it
basically. And I just think I'd rather
teach the kids free more lessons on maths.
So again, we're talking. You can hear about what a good
maths lesson looks like. It looks like constant quality
formative assessment. Do formative assessment all the
time. Feedback from your children.
Change your lesson on the spot if you have to, if your children
can't do something they need to do to access the rest of them.
I just add as well, formative assessment can include testing.
It can include testing. We do something in our school,
it's cumulative testing. It's not.
So just take away this idea of the summative idea of like, oh,
let's test them on the whole of the group, even though they
haven't taught the whole curriculum yet.
You can do formative. I do formative testing every
single week. I'll spend 10 minutes doing an
arithmetic test purely based on skills I've taught them, the
arithmetic skills I've taught them just to see if they're if
they're retaining. But.
To me that that is still summative, but just done right.
Like it's summative in that I'm not forming this opinion as I
go. I've I've taught this and I'm
seeing if they can do it. It's like good summative
assessment. It's closer to formative.
You're right, because you're kind of teaching.
As you go easy to manage. You know what I do every single
week? Just again, because if you're
listening this. Is a policy, yeah.
For ideas, what I do is I sit there on a, on a, some point in
the week and I'll write 10 arithmetic questions based on
stuff we've even been learning recently or based on stuff from
weeks ago that where I'm like, oh, they, they were showing at
that time they weren't very that they needed more practise on
this. And I will then deliver the
test. I will literally just do it like
not even like a formal gap analysis.
I will just shot on a piece of paper which questions are most
incorrectly answered, Right. And I'll just see if there's a
bit of a pattern here. And I'll be like, oh, wow,
number six points out. And we'll be doing, I don't
know, decimals multiplied by whole numbers.
OK, brilliant. OK, I clearly didn't teach that
very well. Next week I will put that in my
starter and then guess what? I'll put it in that week's test
as well. And I'll just see if it improves
and if it did, cool. If I can take it off, then I'll
move on. And I just every week, I'm just
using a formative assessment tool of arithmetic test very,
very easily, quickly identify gaps in things I've taught,
being really important, they're things I've taught, and then
fill them if I need to. Yeah.
Easy. This is how I would summarise
this whole point here with assessment.
OK, assessment is genuinely, honestly only useful if you're
testing children on things they've done.
OK. Look at it like that.
If you're testing children on things they have not been taught
yet, you are completely wasting everyone's time.
That is honestly true because in that time that I did that test
when they were doing questions they've never seen before.
Oh my God. But they.
Might already be able to do it they.
Might already be able to do it. Cool.
Do you know what in my lesson planning?
In that case, they'll move through the fluency and
reasoning. They'll like be able does a test
really test if they can explain their answer, justify their
reasoning, prove something. Do you know problem solve.
That's a good point, no So if they can already do it in a test
situation, cool. I've got 17 other things that I
care about though from the career.
With that objective with. That objective.
So do you know what we're going to get there?
I've got a problem solving thing for them where they've got to
try and, you know, try an improvement or draw a picture or
act something out. It doesn't matter if they can do
it in the test or not, that's not changed.
What's going to happen when it comes?
You can. Still enrich their mathematical
understanding. Going right back to the
beginnings episode. You can still enrich, you know,
the curriculum aims. Yeah, you can still.
Oh. Let's look at those aims, shall
we? Oh, yeah.
OK, cool. I've not done that.
Oh, but they answered the question 44 in this test that we
haven't taught yet. Cool.
Has that changed the aims, the curriculum?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
No. And I'm guessed.
Yeah, maybe. Yeah, that's interesting.
So yeah, I think our our opinions on that assessment
quite clear, formative, very useful, essential to be in a
good maths teacher. Summative has some places, has
some uses, but really low down on the list.
Generally a bit of a waste of their time and your time.
You could have just taught them three good maths lessons in that
time you did the tests to be honest.
So brilliant. Well, I honestly I think this
this episode could have been twice as long.
I know I could feel us trying to.
Be like I know let's go. But guys I hope you find it
useful. You clicked on it for a bit of
help with to do maths. Hopefully you can see how
passionate we are. And yeah, I, we do to an extent,
I think kind of know what we're talking about.
I hope. Otherwise we're just wasting our
problem. Let's know.
If you've got any questions as well, you know, we'll, we'll
always ask. I'm told man, by the way, I'm in
Denham so. Yeah, OK, Cheers.
Thanks, Sir. Opening that up, guys.
Thank you so much for listening. And if you've got this far,
please, all we ask really is that you leave us a review,
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