Programmes for students : accelerating mathematics

When a school has identified a group of students falling below National Standards expectations in mathematics, the ALiM (accelerated learning in mathematics) intervention project and its related MST (mathematics support teacher) project can be accessed.

When viewed as a whole, ALiM and MST take three years to complete. Schools undertake the inquiry into the acceleration of mathematics - either through opting into just one year and sustaining this process themselves, or going deeper by adding MST to help sustain their on-going improvement and inquiry processes.

ALiM and MST shouldn’t be thought of as a programme, because participating schools and teachers have a lot of flexibility to try different approaches in the actual design of their intervention. Rather, the two projects aim to give teachers the chance to share ideas, and utilise the guidance and advice of specialists.

Schools can discuss participating in the ALiM/MST project with their regional ministry office, based on data identifying the needs of their students. To benefit from ALiM/MST, schools need to have some effective mathematics teaching practice already in place. It should be noted that schools intending to participate in MST must have completed ALiM.

ALiM teachers work with one group of identified students over a 10 – 15 week period, whereas the MST teacher’s role is for a whole year. During this time, MST teachers work with multiple groups.

Additionally, the ALiM programme seeks to accelerate the learning of just one identified group of around six to eight students, who have been achieving ‘just below’ the National Standards.
An MST teacher works with several smaller groups of students, who have been identified as achieving ‘well below’ the National Standards.

Schools participating in the MST project nominate one teacher, or sometimes two for large schools, to step into the actual MST role. These teachers, over the next two years, complete post-graduate work outside the classroom, in the form of one university paper per year. This solid grounding in theory assists them in leading the design of a school’s mathematics intervention programme.

Obviously the MST must have a recognised degree to be eligible. Previously, MST teachers in their second year chose between two papers, but both papers over the two years are now compulsory. These are: (MST year 1) Making mathematics accessible and (MST year 2) Mathematics Education. Both are worth 30 credits.

While the MST is studying (outside school hours), they will also be implementing the skills they have learned. Funding that is allocated is intended to provide schools with the means to release MST teachers from some of their normal classes, so that they can work with the identified group of learners. This funding takes account of school size and decile. There is also an expectation that schools will contribute to funding. Within the initial ALiM programme, funding also means that schools can send principals and teachers to a series of workshops. More information on these workshops can be found in the first article of this series, Accelerated Learning in Literacy and Mathematics (Education Gazette, Volume 92, Issue 13).

Mentorship is available through PLD providers, for both ALiM and MST schools. The number of ‘contacts’ these mentorship specialists will have with a school varies, depending on whether they are ALiM or MST. A school’s remoteness can also be a factor. Schools are also supported at training days, visits to the school, Skype meetings, cluster meetings, and email conversations with specialists. 

 

During their study, MSTs conduct a thorough examination of several key themes, that are then incorporated into the design of their intervention programme. Examples of these themes include:

• Mathematics discourse: a lot of time is spent studying this during the first year of an MST’s learning. This is about creating a discussion around learning, and allowing students to elaborate on their own thinking.
• Revoicing: this idea is strongly associated with discourse. This means that students are able to restate their understanding of a concept, in their own words. Encouraging students to do this assists understanding.
• Rich tasks: a task or activity is ‘rich’ when it is approachable to students of different ability levels. It will also successfully encourage students to learn off each other.
• Wait time: this involves encouraging, and allowing for, all students to examine a problem and come up with a solution, regardless of ability level, or speed of comprehension.

Framing all these concepts and more, MSTs study the nature of best practice in a classroom environment, in which these themes are all able to work effectively.

ALiM in action at Red Beach School

Hellen Healey is associate principal and mathematics lead teacher at Red Beach primary school in the Rodney region. She reports that her school saw the ALiM project as an important opportunity to improve pedagogical understanding, and to arrest a noticeable trend.

“We looked at our data from the whole school over the last year, and we could see that this year’s current Year 5 had a lower level of achievement in maths, and that the group had shown the same tendency throughout their school life.”

The initial workshops were helpful, says Hellen, because they facilitated the sharing of strategies, and allowed her team to get advice from ALiM leaders. These specialists weren’t there to instruct, but rather to share initial ideas from which a programme could be pulled together according to their own knowledge of the unique issues faced by Red Beach.

Hellen and her colleague Sinead Heckett, who conducted all the intervention classes, found it initially very useful that they were able to be released from class to observe their target group. From this, they were able to see that two common obstacles were affecting many of the group.

“We had identified problem solving and the use of mathematics language as an issue at our school, within our target group. Sinead designed the programme to deal with those.”

“One of our responses to these challenges was to introduce real-life problems. We wanted to put exercises into a meaningful context, and we found that this helped make activities more fun and engaging. We really wanted to create a compelling reason for students to solve a problem.”

Sinead reiterates that the design of the intervention was very much left up to their school team, but that there was plenty of guidance available throughout the process.

“The initial two-day conference that we attended was all about talking about the parameters of the project. It wasn’t really about telling us what our programme should look like ‘on the ground’. Our cluster group met in our region, and we had lots of involvement from national leaders. That’s where we actually thrashed out the design of our programme, and had the opportunity to share ideas and strategy with other schools. That was incredibly useful and vital, in fact.”

Sinead was responsible for the actual design of the intervention at Red Beach, and says that it became apparent that engaging students had to be a priority in order to get them achieving National Standards.

“When I got to talk to these kids in detail, lots were saying that they found maths a bit boring. We needed to bring more ‘doing’ into lessons. So for example, we created an activity where the students made rainbow jellies. They found a recipe, and went out and bought the ingredients. They then had to use volume understanding to work out how many millilitres of each colour they would need. It was a highly motivating way to lead them through the concept.”

ALiM has achieved real results for Red Beach School, in bringing a group that was flying just below the radar up to speed. Sinead breaks down the numbers.

“Over the course of our 10-week programme, five out of the six targeted students shifted from ‘below’ [National Standard level] to ‘at standard’. We made this judgement in June, so they had achieved with half the year to go. The one student who didn’t quite get there still made a whole year’s worth of progress.”

“We used a variety of testing methods, at the halfway point and at the end. We were really interested in the results of the PAT tests, because they give a good overview of a student as a mathematician. They all made between six and 20 points of scale score shift, which equates to anything between eight months and two and half years progress in 10 weeks.

Both Sinead and Hellen say that the ALiM experience has been very positive at their school. But the most important thing has been spreading the message throughout the school. Sinead and her team have used some of the learning that happened within ALiM to inform a coaching programme, that is working well as an on-going measure.