Matt Bland on teaching children to problem-solve and how to involve parents (Part 1)

“That's where we got that idea of maybe rushing to the top or rushing up these levels is not helping our children.”

When Matt Bland arrived at Our Lady's Bishop Eton Catholic Primary School in 2014, the timing couldn’t have been better. Mastery was emerging in England as an effective approach to teaching maths — with help from the 2014 National Curriculum — and the school was entering a period of self-reflection about how they taught the subject.

“As I joined the school, we were starting to have those conversations,” Matt, now assistant head teacher, a maths teacher and a specialist education leader, said in an interview. “But there were very, very early green shoots.”

Matt describes Bishop Eton as a school in the “leafy suburbs” of Liverpool in a well-off area with affluent, middle-class parents who want “high attainment and high progress.” He says the school has always been high-attaining and to demonstrate, he points to the fact that when he started, many of the children were leaving at age 11 or 12 with the equivalent of a GCSE in maths — something they normally wouldn’t be ready for until age 16.

“It might have been a D or a C, but doing GCSEs three or four years early, that's a big thing.”

However, the teachers were finding that almost none of the children went on to take maths A Levels. That was particularly true of the girls.

“When they came back to school to visit us, we'd say, ‘So how are you getting on? What are you doing in your A levels?’ And they'd never say maths.”

Maths dropping off

Matt and his colleagues felt that because the children were so far ahead when they left Bishop Eton, they could easily have gone on to do higher maths, and likely then into a very good career in the subject. It should at least have been an option.

“Those children should be in the top 5% of the country, top 1% of the country. The top 1% of the country when they left us were not doing what the top 1% of the country should be doing.”

They began to ask themselves why. They started looking at the way they were teaching maths and at the curriculum they were using. They started asking hard questions like, Is everything totally right with our system? Is everything totally right with the skills we're equipping our children with?

“That's where we got that idea of maybe rushing to the top or rushing up these levels is not helping our children.”

Discovering mastery

That period of self-reflection is what eventually led Matt and his colleagues to discover Maths — No Problem! because the company “had looked into mastery a little bit more than most and were certainly further down the line than other companies. And then our head teacher went to the conferences, and she liked what she heard.”

For Matt, who went to university in Brighton and began his teaching career 20 years ago in East Grinstead before moving to Cyprus to teach at army schools, it was a happy coincidence that Bishop Eton adopted Maths — No Problem!

“I felt Maths — No Problem! chimed with how I taught anyway, how I naturally worked in the classroom. Because of that, I fell into it a bit harder than others, because it suited me very much.”

He says it had a lot to do with the approach, which is to teach the class as a whole using a collaborative style, to pose problems and allow the children to self-discover, and to use manipulatives and other tools to find out their answers.

“You're just dropping in those questions, those thinking questions, those little sinkers,” he says. “And I am one of those teachers who stands in the middle of the room and I just pose those questions, talk to those children.”

Spinning plates

He compares that to how it was in England when he first started teaching. “Loads of groups on different tables, and you had to kind of spin plates and go to each table, work with one table while the others were doing something. It just wasn't really my style.”

But after using Maths — No Problem! for a decade, Matt has seen a change. He tells the story of their latest Ofsted inspection last year, when by coincidence, four female students were visiting him. “And I said, ‘What are you thinking of doing when you get to your A Levels?’ All four of them said ‘Maths.’”

He acknowledges the story is anecdotal — and doesn’t add up to hard evidence — but for him, it’s still gratifying and validates that change in approach a decade ago.

“Ten years ago, they weren't saying maths.”

‘They can see it’

Another big change he notices is the style of teaching and how it has affected the understanding. He says years ago, it would have been normal to just show a pupil how to solve a problem, just to get to the correct answer, without really getting into the concept or the deeper understanding.

“It was definitely, ‘Look, this way you can solve it. So just do a column method, or just click these things over, and that solves it.’ I don't think anyone had a reason why that worked. Now the big change is that they can see it, or they can draw it. And I don't think any of our children could have done that before.”

In his view, that’s because children spend quality time investigating core concepts during the Maths — No Problem! lesson. And they not only have access to concrete resources for every lesson, but they also reflect on what they’ve learned during the journaling process.

As part of that process, children are continually asking themselves questions like: How did I solve that? What did I do? What was the reasoning behind that? How would I like to present my work?

Concrete-resources rule

At Bishop Eton, one of the non-negotiables is that there must be a concrete resource in every maths lesson, whatever the age of the pupil, says Matt, who adds that the rule is in place so the children are following Jerome Bruner’s Concrete-Pictorial-Abstract approach.

“Now, they might not need the concrete resource all the time, and they might be able to move on to pictorial very quickly,” he says. “Or that concrete resource is not just there to add a scaffold. It’s there to sometimes extend learning. Certainly as they get older if you're doing an investigation, that concrete resource is there to maybe extend thinking.”

He has noticed since the school started using Maths — No Problem! that there’s a much bigger emphasis on problem-solving.

“We don't just do a problem-solving month, or a problem-solving couple of weeks. Every day is a problem-solving day, because every day you can be presented with something, and you've got to solve that problem. What skills do you choose to figure that problem out?”

‘Absolute stupidity’

When Matt was first learning about Singapore maths, one of the questions he had was, what does homework look like? Another was, what does parental involvement look like? He remembers reading that in Singapore the children take the books home with them, rather than leaving them at school. So, he got an idea. What if the weekly maths homework on Friday, once the lessons had been marked, was for the children to take the book home with them over the weekend.

“Now I know any other maths teacher, they always gasp and go, ‘we'd never get it back. Why would you do that? It’s absolute stupidity.’ And when I suggested that idea, I had all of those reactions, but I just felt that we could do it. Reading books come home every day. Why wouldn't maths books?”

He said he finally got approval to do it, and over the past 10 years, he’s had to replace fewer than 20 books. “Last year, I think I had one.”

The reason the books don’t go missing is simple. “I've always said, If you value something, it becomes valuable. We value maths. We value what we're doing. Therefore that is valuable. And everyone looks after a valuable resource.”

Different ways to solve problems

When he first reached out to parents to get involved, many of them pushed back, saying maths was being taught differently to how they had learned it.

“We were getting, ‘Oh, in my day, that's how we did it. It's different now.’ I had to get over that hurdle.”

He had to tell the parents, in essence, we’re doing it one way, you did it another way, but that’s okay. “And that's what we're teaching the children—there's lots of different ways to solve a problem, and we can all learn from each other.”

‘Alright with awkward’

To spark a collaborative approach with the parents, Matt hosts regular meetings with the parents at the school. The parents take on the role of the children and he teaches them a Maths — No Problem! lesson.

“I say ‘Look, I need you to play along here. It's going to be awkward if you don't, but I'll go with it. I’m alright with awkward.’”

He says not all the parents show up, but the ones who do really enjoy it. Plus, they get to learn the Maths — No Problem! process.

“And once you do that, parents get involved and are supportive,” he says.

He asks the parents to do one of three things. If their child got everything right with the week’s lessons, he just wants them to talk about it. If the child got some right and some wrong, fix the ones that are wrong and talk about how they do it. If the child got it all wrong, find what stage they’re at and just do a couple of problems around that, just to move them on.

“And I love the transparency,” he says. “You can't come at the end of the year and go, ‘I had no idea Johnny can't do maths. Why didn’t you tell me?’ I told you every weekend because it's come home. It's been in the bag every weekend.”