The Essence of Teaching for Mastery

Penwortham Girls’ High Mathematics Department work extremely hard ensuring that all students are taught through a mastery style approach. This is achieved in many ways but mainly from the department working collaboratively to ensure that they have a coherent curriculum and ‘mastery’ lessons. So, what does mastery look like for our students?

In the classroom

Students are taught through whole-class interactive teaching, enabling all to master the concepts necessary for the next part of the curriculum sequence.
In a typical lesson, the teacher leads back and forth interaction, including questioning, short tasks, explanation, demonstration, and discussion, enabling students to think, reason and apply their knowledge to solve problems.
Use of precise mathematical language enables all students to communicate their reasoning and thinking effectively.
If a student fails to grasp a concept or procedure, this is identified quickly, and gaps in understanding are addressed systematically to prevent them falling behind.
Significant time is spent developing deep understanding of the key ideas that are needed to underpin future learning.
Key number facts are learnt to automaticity, and other key mathematical facts are learned deeply and practised regularly, to avoid cognitive overload in working memory and enable pupils to focus on new learning.

Penwortham Girls’ High School is part of a collaborative network of schools, all on their mastery journey, led by Secondary Maths Mastery Specialists from Abacus NW Maths Hub. Mr McVey is a Mastery Advocate for Penwortham Girls’ High School and Mrs Bennett is a Secondary Maths Mastery Specialists and an Assistant Maths Hub lead.

One of the activities that the Maths Hub likes to encourage, is for advocates from other schools in the collaborative network to observe live mastery lessons.

Mr Henshaw (Secondary Maths Mastery Specialist and Assistant Maths Hub Lead) delivered a live mastery lesson to a Year 10 mathematics class at our school.

Teaching direct proportion using the directly proportional symbol ‘α’ is generally taught through a process. In this lesson, the teacher demonstrated how this topic could be taught through understanding and thinking mathematically. Students had some prior knowledge from their Physics lessons.

Students had the opportunity to work in pairs to generate pairs of numbers that were directly proportional to each other.

They then worked collaboratively to identify whether the ratio tables were in proportion or not!

Students then were introduced to the ‘GCSE’ styles of questions.

The lesson ended with understanding of what direct proportion on a graph looked like.

Year 10 did us proud with exemplar behaviour and excellent interaction with the teacher and their peers. Not many students can cope with being watched by another teacher, let alone 15 teachers from different schools!

Mrs Bennett, Secondary Mathematics Teaching For Mastery Lead