Higher Order Mathematics, New Curriculum, Lesson Study Program
Background
Camden won a London Schools Excellence Fund bid last August to run a two year development and research program with the University of Cambridge. It has three aims. The first is to improve pupil progress and attainment in the harder to teach and harder to learn areas of the new mathematics national curriculum, thus boosting attainment and progress in mathematics. There is a focus on years five to eight, but this is not exclusive. Key to this first aim is improving teachers’ understandings of how their specific pupils learn most successfully in these mathematical areas, allowing these teachers to adjust their teaching or collectively to innovate and transfer new teaching approaches, capitalising on the deeper understandings that they are developing of how pupils best learn the new mathematics. This improves teachers’ subject teaching expertise at the same time as improving pupil progress. As we are engaging in this process, we are using the information gained to map out progression routes through these new curriculum strands of mathematics based on how different pupils best learn them.
Teachers are currently gaining this enhanced understanding of how to improve how their pupils’ learning through a systematic, borough-wide program of lesson studies carried out by Primary and Secondary schools in the program. The findings from these ‘mass’ lesson studies are swiftly distilled and shared across the schools involved.
The importance of such joint professional learning to system-wide improvement is acknowledged in the McKinsey reports (2007, 2010) and by David Hargreaves in his work on self-improving school systems (2010, 2012). In addition to the Cambridge team, the program has international advisers from Japan and Singapore. The program design has the potential to establish systemic approaches to improving progress and achievement that have much wider application.
The second aim of the program relates to this wider ambition – to develop routines in schools and across school groups, that support this style of professional learning as part of their every-day business, so that the lesson study expertise can extend beyond mathematics to other areas of improvement in learning, teaching and or closing gaps, and so that these approaches to professional learning and practice improvement become affordable and sustainable.
The University of Cambridge team is working to help achieve a vital third aim – to better understand how we can mobilise teacher ‘practice-knowledge’ across classrooms and schools, through better understanding processes of teacher learning and practice development. We know that most of our practice knowledge is tacit in nature and thus hard to access and mobilise. There is however evidence that Lesson Study gives teachers access these stores of tacit knowledge.
The Team
Pete Dudley and Jean Lang, both senior leaders in Camden, have played key roles in introducing lesson study to the UK and developing its use. They lead this Camden program. Pete is also advising very large EEF and the DfE projects that are using Lesson Study to improve progress and to narrow gaps. Both Jean and Pete are involved in Lesson Study development internationally.
The Cambridge team includes Professors Jan Vermunt and Neil Mercer, both of whom are global leaders in this field and are bringing together promising strands of research from across the world in ways that that we believe will yield huge benefits for London schools and London learners. We also have mathematics expertise from England’s former senior HMI for mathematics and former Senior Director for Mathematics in the National Strategies: Nigel Bufton and from Sami Miller, a Mathematics consultant in Camden.
Phase two of the program and how you can get involved.
In September we will start working with a much larger group of London schools within but also beyond Camden.
The aim of the second year will be to share what we have learned in year one about each of the three aims – new curriculum mathematics, collaborative professional learning and system development. There is an expectation that the schools involved will take on Lesson Study based developments in mathematics and that they will be prepared to share their work with not only with the program, but also with other schools. We are currently developing models for these ways of working and hope to use a blended range of approaches including direct school to school working as well as web enabled approaches.
If you work in London and are interested in taking part in year 2 of the project, please contact Vitaly Voytenko – vitaly.voytenko@camden.gov.uk who can give you more information and tell you about events we are holding across London to promote the project.
