I have a feeling Tanya’s op-ed will be well-received by high schools around the world, esp in NZ and Australia.
—
In 2009, I made the mistake of assuming children would arrive from primary school with adequate competency in basic maths. In the first year at my secondary school, students didn’t (couldn’t) make the progress I knew they were capable of. I figured they’d pick up the multiplication tables simply through all the other maths we were doing. (“There’s loads of multiplication in Other Maths; they’ll be fine.”)
Turns out the multiplication in Other Maths was insufficient in itself to improve retrieval so *every* time they had to call on their memory to remember a times table (or fall back on deriving it), it was time consuming and inefficient. It was a blocker, if fact, to doing the Other Maths.
Faced with another cohort, in 2010, of year 7s who were as mathematically far behind as the first lot, I decided enough was enough. No more papering over cracks.
We would have to dedicate time in secondary school maths lessons to daily retrieval of multiplication facts. It would have to be pedagogically sound and it would have to give each student a sense of the progress they were making. Oh, and it had to generate lots of silly fun. 🤩
Hence the genesis of
@TTRockStars
—
Since then, primary schools in England have been making the most of cognitive science and dedicating sufficient time to low stakes quizzing of the tables and other things. Our maths results have never been better. (Not through fluency practice alone I would stress.)
England’s “teaching for mastery” approach (championed by the Maths Hubs,
@NCETM @WhiteRoseEd @MathsMastery etc) has done wonders to develop children’s *understanding* of maths in parallel with intelligent retrieval practice, not at the expense of it.
I’d like to think that secondary schools in England, who have been downstream of the changes in primary for a while, are enjoying the hard work primary colleagues have put in.
So I totally get why headteachers in New Zealand are thanking Tanya for her excellent article. Let’s hope it leads to a change in the prevailing educational winds there.