What are your key principles?

Fundamental to our Mastering Maths research study are our key principles. These underpin everything we are doing in terms of working with teachers and learners. In the last few weeks we have been setting up the study and working with the teachers who signed up and were randomly allocated to the intervention arm of the trial. This has prompted me to reflect on the importance of our key principles. These emerged as part of the initial stages of setting up the Centres for Excellence in Maths (CfEM) programme.

These principles make explicit our philosophical stance and this? guides everything we do. They encapsulate our overall beliefs and intentions about how we consider we should work with students who have yet to attain what is considered a “pass grade” in mathematics at GCSE - a grade 4 or above. The principles relate to matters mathematical such as the structure of number, but also to how we should approach our work in classrooms as teachers. They are informed by, and sensitive to, the particular context in which we are working: the teaching and learning of GCSE resits in FE colleges.

Importantly, we recognise that a class of students will come together having had many varied pathways through mathematics over their school experience. We need to be sensitive to what they have experienced and work with where they are in the understanding of mathematics (often not very securely held) as well as using this as a resource in collaborative classroom work.?

Consideration of each of our five principles has guided every detail of our lesson and task design. We make them very visible in our lesson guidance and our professional development work, as well as using them to determine the research questions we have that guide our inquiry in the lessons of our lesson study cycles.?

It has struck me over my years in curriculum and assessment development work that I have always worked with carefully constructed design principles but that these have not often been made explicit to end users. It strikes me that making them publicly explicit and sharing them at every appropriate stage has been a fundamental part of ensuring the efficacy of our Mastering Maths approach. They have acted as a touchstone in our development of resources, the PD programme, and the structuring of the lesson study and PD programme at every stage.

It is my suggestion that having such key principles - and making them explicit - should underpin and inform any development work that we and others do in the future.