Investigating sustained NDP practice

Dr Fiona EllUniversity of Auckland

• What is the nature of the organisational dynamic operating in schools that sustain the numeracy development?

How can we see this?

• Practice framed by systems

• Desired change at the level of teachers and children

• What supports ongoing quality practice in teaching numeracy within a school?

2005 study

• Three levels – documentation and resourcing (lead teacher interviews, collecting materials), teacher interviews and video of lessons.

• Participants: two schools: urban, contributing, 20 teachers; rural, full, 7 teachers

• Five teachers at each school – lead teacher and four others

• Two teachers at each school volunteered to be videoed (selection issues)

Summary from 2005 study

• The two schools had contrasting approaches to sustaining the project at a school level

• The teacher interviews confirmed the importance of adequate resourcing and the support of peers and lead teachers

• Videoed lessons suggest that confident teachers are continuing to use superficial programme elements as a framework for continuing to explore children's thinking

• Further work on sharing of strategies and refinement of strategies may be of benefit to these teachers

2006 study

• Participants: two schools: urban, contributing, 20 teachers; rural, full, 7 teachers

• Two Intermediate schools – one Auckland, one Waikato

Participants

• City School

• Two teachers - interview and video of a class lesson

• One of the teachers had been interviewed the previous year

• Country School

• Six teachers interviewed

• Two teachers videoed – same teachers as last year

What does it mean to ‘sustain’?

• Maintain and sustain

• Ongoing development and increase in skill rather than ‘wearing off’ or reverting

• Staff continue to question, to engage with numeracy, to be excited about their teaching of mathematics

Top Down and Bottom Up

• Contrast between City School and Country School in implementation

• Country School has now done policy and formalised assessment procedures and the sharing of data / setting of targets

• City School has continued to focus on supporting staff who are new to the project and on resourcing the teaching of numeracy. (whiteboards)

City School Themes

• Interest in numeracy teaching and learning has continued

• Staff turnover, training and support

• Simplification of processes

• Integrated curriculum

City School

• New staff involved in NDP contract

• Revised their assessment procedures and recording requirements for teachers – simplification

• Lead teacher doing observations and class visits to colleagues – peer support

• Staff turnover a challenge – training profile

City School

Issues for the new teacher

- Children deviating from the suggested script with ideas that are ‘conceptually quite difficult’

- ‘coming to grips with actually explaining’

- Managing effective group rotations

Issues for the experienced teacher

- Finding manageable ways to get teachers to plan, assess and report

- Teaching the parents and getting them on board

- Fitting NDP into an integrated curriculum approach

Country School - Themes

• Interest in numeracy teaching and learning has continued

• Planning – meeting children's needs

• Strands

• Being creative and generative

Country School - Planning

• Five of the six teachers mentioned planning as the hardest part of continuing the project

• They reported spending half an hour to an hour a day planning maths alone

• Planning issues linked to issues about creativity and being generative

Planning

“At least half an hour a day just thinking about…yes, we are doing this and how am I going to teach it and what activity am I going to have to support for that group, then the next group that is their activity and the game that’s going to help them support what they learnt and then the third group I mean really I think you plan six sessions at once and I find that really hard. Sometimes you think ‘oh no…’ and I think you have to plan it or it goes to pieces and it doesn’t work.”

Teacher D

Planning

I am not sure whether planning is the right word either, it’s just knowing where to go from here to there and if they have been on that level for a month, what’s a different thing I can do that I haven't done before that is still teaching the same strategy or the same knowledge. There isn’t a book that says start here and keep going and you’ll be fine…with the juniors you can do today we will use cars and tomorrow we will sue teddy bears so the kids don’t know they are learning the same thing, but with the seniors you can’t do that.

Planning

I have found that the planning of maths has become so onerous…if you had asked me three years ago what subject would I most like to give away it would not have been maths abut now it is, simply because of the planning. Everyday you have to think where are we at today and where are we going tomorrow and it’s just huge and I expect it to be getting less and it’s not…I can relate to schools and individual teachers that have said this is too much. I can relate to that. I’m not saying anyone here would do that, and I certainly wouldn’t do that but I can understand, and if I hear someone say that I don’t knock them down, I think, OK, well I understand where you are coming from.

Teacher A

Country School - Strands

• PAT profile – strands lagging behind number knowledge; number knowledge for children who had attended Country School was very sound

• Decided to do blocks of strand work in 2006 – in 2005 had not addressed how to do this

Strands

• Two teachers on video taught measurement

• Lesson features: warm up number games, use of scrapbooks, grouping based on pre-test results, small group strategy teaching, questioning, pair-sharing, active exploration by independent groups

• Change from previous practice

Strands

“I love the numeracy project but then I think maybe it doesn’t incorporate the other strands. We just stopped and did a four week block on measurement and I find now that I have to get back into the numeracy project all of a sudden…they could blend in because you know measurement is all counting and doing things like that but it’s quite separate.”

Teacher F: newly trained in NDP

Strands

“We have reconsidered our policy at the school here to ensure that we get coverage of the strands. In saying that they have to know the number strand and I think strand teaching is basically teaching vocab. I did a test on the children and they had to measure the perimeter of something. Because they didn’t know the perimeter they got it wrong. Teach them the word perimeter and they can add the numbers together or multiply them so they still have their number knowledge. Its just getting them to transfer what they know into different aspects of their daily lives.”

Teacher D, experienced in NDP.

Country School – Generating new Ideas

• The role of the resource in sustaining the project

• Initial task framed as coming to terms with the resource - relying on the ‘book’.

• Concern over time about repetition, boredom, needing more material, not knowing how to ‘make things up’ that fit

Summary

• Both schools are continuing to engage with numeracy as a key focus

• Both schools still have staff involved in training• City School interviews and observations

highlight the challenges of having a larger staff and keeping everyone going, but also the benefits of experts and novices within the same school

• Country School interviews and observations reveal planning and generating ideas as key concerns for teachers. Consideration of other strands has been a focus for this school.