Before I go on, let me tell you about Friday evening. I met an old colleague (we went “out, out” to watch Alan Davies BTW) and I told her about my day and mentioned how in my naivety as a newbie teacher I used to say that I was never going to turn into the “negferret” teachers I’d met along the way. You know the ones: those who I had interpreted as being negative about teaching – the ones that I used to think “if it’s that bad get out!” Every week I meet newbies who are full of enthusiasm, saying things like “I want to get better in my teaching, I want to learn” They’re saying all the right things. Don’t get me wrong – I want to learn too – I don’t want to pull these people down but through writing this shiz down in my blog I want to ensure that people are getting all the information. I don’t intend on being negative – that’s not me (it really isn’t!) – What I want people to do is stop just accepting things they are told and do the research themselves. Looking back I now feel bad about thinking these negferret teachers were whingeing – at least they weren’t just “rolling over” to changes, which would have been worse – they were fighting for the “right thing”. Oh how wonderful is hindsight?

This conversation stemmed from the fact that on Friday I went to see one of the Shanghai teachers as part of the Maths Hubs exchange programme after receiving an invite from Robert Wilne (probably following one of my ranting posts!). I am now writing this having had 2 days to think about what I saw and how I feel about it. I am going to separate the lesson with peripheral thoughts but before I go on let me say I have an open mind about the whole thing. No, I really do … but I am cynical about the motives.

I am not saying that the intentions are wrong – in fact I believe in the principles of the hubs – I genuinely believe that people at the coal face are doing what they think is best for maths education. I have doubts about the motives further up the food chain – I’m not talking about the teachers on the ground, or those involved in the Maths Hubs or NCETM – I’m talking about the government. “Blowing the wind up the proverbial” of China is part of a bigger political picture – as a country we are strengthening our political and economic links with China and I take umbrage at education being used as a political pawn.

I digress. The whole organisation of the day/morning was brilliant. I arrived at Kings Norton Girls School and along with about 14 other people were taken to a room where the context of what we were about to observe was explained. I initially introduced myself as Mel from Alcester Academy but felt that I had to be honest and say that I was also JustMaths – I actually said “I’m going to admit I’m cynical as I believe that we have similar expertise in this country and probably in fact in this very room (and I don’t mean me!!)”.

The structure of the morning was such that prior to the observation a briefing was held and then the group reviewed what they had seen after the lesson and discussed the implications to their teaching.

During the briefing we were told where this lesson sat in the sequence of lessons and an outline of how each of these algebra lessons focused on taking tiny steps and not trying to ram too much into what the “learning objective” was in each lesson. Today’s lesson was solving linear equations with brackets – focussing specifically on the brackets (as they’d solved equations before) – I’m going to post a blog about the lesson later too otherwise this post will be endless!

After the lesson the Shanghai teacher – her name was pronounced “Echo” (probably spelt differently but I’ll go with that) came into the room and spoke to us. She gave some background from her perspective as to the approach to the lesson and took (lots of!) questions. The idea of the group observation is something I felt she was very brave doing but if it was something that we were used to from the outset of our teaching I can imagine it being very meaningful. At no point did I feel I was there to judge her ability to teach – I’m sure I’m not the person to do this to any other teacher anyway – I was focussing on the strategies she was using at key points in the lesson. However, during the feedback it was evident how toxic our system of feedback has become when she was asked about the lesson “faltering” … Personally I didn’t see that it did if you were focussing on the pedagogy and it is so difficult to judge a single lesson in isolation least of all someone teaching a group for a short period of time. End of. Why do we have this need to “judge” lessons? Who decides what the key measures are? Why those measures anyway?

I do wonder how big an impact a similar programme of observing some of the best teachers we have in the UK would make to the observed and those that observe them. I suppose to some extent those involved in the exchange programme are having a bit of this idolatry and to them it will make a massive difference to their lifespan in teaching – maybe this is the start of widening that net. It is still early days for the Maths Hubs and I still think the same as I did when they were launched – the scale of the project isn’t big enough.

I stand by what I say – we have the expertise on this very land – the issue is maths education is having a personality crisis. There are so many schools of thought out there as to “what we should be teaching and how we should be teaching it”. Lots is being done in researching good practice and there are loads of case studies but the fact is people can’t agree on the best way to teach something and just because it works in one context doesn’t mean it will work in another. Maths teaching is part of a bigger education system that has gone from being “knowledge based” to “skills based” and now is moving back to more of a “knowledge based” focus – there is a whole generation of teachers that know nothing else other than a three-part lesson! (To those of you that advocated this – I hope you’re hanging your head in shame!) To some extent this needs “unteaching” and a shift of focus back to good ol’ pedagogy needs to take place …. Can this be done whilst we work with the current measures of accountability within a school; a subject specialist will see the subtleties in a maths lesson but not all observers will and this is the crux for many teachers looking for career progression? (Or dare I say it … any teacher looking to “pass” performance management?)

There are so many issues in maths education – shortage of maths specialists in primary schools, recruitment, subject knowledge, performance management, assessment and accountability (to name just a few!) that I know it is difficult to know where to start. It is also hard (impossible?) to unravel maths from the wider edu-landscape and I fear that we are treating the symptoms and not the cause. Many of our ills stem from the increased accountability that schools are subject to and the lack of education awareness from some government officials – forced academisation and even jobs are at risk – Schools and teachers do need to be held to account but I’m not convinced that what is happening today with Ofsted as the overseer is working. I’m not sure there is a solution to accountability but it needs to be said!

I’m also not convinced that much of what I saw in the lesson was new – not to me anyway – there are elements of the lesson that most good teachers would do at some point dependent upon the topic. Through the conversations afterwards and through speaking to primary teachers every week I can see that many of the teaching concepts would be new in a primary setting but not so much in secondary. At least not in my experience … maybe I’m wrong (it has been known you know!)… and not because the pedagogy isn’t sound because it is and that is the reason – many good secondary teachers do this stuff anyway and it just hasn’t been held up there as sound practice.

The extent to which elements of the Shanghai Approach can be superimposed onto the UK secondary landscape remains to be seen but I don’t see it being the panacea to our ills but I suppose doing “something” is better than nothing. I’ll be back later with details about the lesson – let’s just say I came away with some things to reflect on, which I suppose is a good thing.

I’m also going to finish the post the way I started … do the research for yourself. Contact your local Maths hub and get in and see one of the Shanghai teachers for yourself and draw your own conclusions.