How to Recognise and Support Mathematical Mastery in Young Children’s Play

Learning from the 'Talk for Maths Mastery' Initiative

Di Chilvers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367133573
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429649394
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Early Childhood Education

This book explains how young children develop mathematically in their earliest years and shows the support and teaching needed by adults to accelerate their progress and attainment, helping them master mathematical concepts and skills.

The practical guidance has been carefully developed over a number of years and is based on research undertaken with primary schools in Sheffield as part of the 'Talk for Maths Mastery' initiative. It recognises that children's mathematical development is embedded within child-led play and connected to deeper levels of thinking and wider dispositions for learning. Maths is happening everywhere at any moment; we just need to keep an open mind, open eyes, and listen.

Including case studies, links to practice and reflective questions, the chapters reveal what mastery orientation looks like from the children's perspective in their learning and covers:

• children's serve and return conversational talk
• mathematical babies and their developmental momentum
• schematic patterns of thinking
• mathematical mark-making
• child-led play
• problem solving
• creative and critical thinking
• how adults can support children's mathematical talk, thinking and mastery

This book will help all early years practitioners and teachers working with children throughout the EYFS and KS1 build their understanding, knowledge, experience and confidence of engaging in early mathematics.

1 What is Talk for Maths Mastery?

DI CHILVERS

This chapter looks at how the Talk for Maths Mastery initiative can help you to develop good mathematical practice with your children, whilst at the same time furthering your own understanding and confidence.

This means taking a good look at what the children are doing and saying, what the adults are doing and saying and what the enabling environment is doing and saying, then bringing this all together and prioritising what you need to do next to move things on.

We explain the TFMM initiative, sharing our questions, observations and findings, along with the ‘tools’ and strategies we used to help us to stop and think about what we were already doing, how we looked deeply at our practice and reflected on what we saw.

• What is Talk for Maths Mastery?
• What is an extended professional development initiative?
• How to get started with Talk for Maths Mastery?
• How to use the Talk for Maths Mastery tools and strategies in practice?
• What should you do with your research findings? What do they tell you about practice?
• Talk for Maths Mastery – Our story

What is Talk for Maths Mastery?

Talk for Maths Mastery has evolved from its beginnings into a way of working with young children which brings together the following strands:

• Recognising that young children are competent and capable learners with their own learning momentum, intrinsically motivated to actively play, explore and engage in creative and critical thinking
• Supportive adults who know and understand how children develop and learn, including mathematical development from birth to 6+
• Providing an enabling environment which tunes into young children’s mathematical lines of development and their interests in ways that connect to familiar real life, authentic contexts
• Collaborative partnerships with parents and families based on real-life, everyday home learning experiences and culture

This book explores all these strands in depth. However, in practice with young children, the strands are all woven together as they all interweave and connect, creating a holistic approach which supports children’s development, thinking, talking and learning. Together they create a mathematical pedagogy:

‘Pedagogy’ is what we know about children and how they learn, together with the experiences and responses we provide. It describes our methodology and our understanding and beliefs of what is right for young children.

In determining the nature of our pedagogy, we need to consider the child, the experiences we provide, our interactions, the environment, the family and their community and how these factors influence each child’s holistic development and progress in learning.

(Education Scotland, 2020)

The emphasis is on Talk, Maths and Mastery. Whilst children’s talk, communication and language are probably, for most, a familiar concept, mathematics and mastery are often viewed as an unknown, scary prospect to delve into, and only if we really must! Kath Priestley (Chapter 7) raises the persistent issue of adults’ confidence in mathematics, usually a leftover from poor teaching at secondary school. However, one of the ‘hidden outcomes’ of TFMM, and working together with others, was the development of professional confidence and understanding, through observing children and talking together about what they were doing. It was empowering, with many light bulb moments, which revealed, “Oh that’s what is happening!” and, “Now I understand why they did/said that”.

Feedback from the TFMM partners, at the end of year one, was extremely positive, as adults said they were “more confident at recognising, facilitating and deepening children’s mathematical learning”. TFMM strategies had “opened their eyes to mathematical opportunities”, and they “felt empowered to support children’s mathematical development”. Building professional confidence and self-awareness takes time, which is why extended professional development initiatives are so valuable in growing adults’ knowledge, experience and practice.

What is an extended professional development initiative?

One of the most effective ways of developing your thinking and practice is to become part of an extended professional development initiative (EPDI), which simply means working together, collaboratively as a group or community of learners, over a period of time. It is a highly effective way to develop thinking and professional learning because the ‘community’ becomes a forum for developing ideas, sharing good practice and raising the quality of learning and teaching. Siraj-Blatchford and Manni (2007), in their work on effective leadership, talked about “A community of learners with a common commitment to reflective, critical practice and professional development” (p. 16). Wenger-Trayner (2015) explain:

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.

Working together as a community of learners in the TFMM initiative was an inspiring experience for the practitioners and teachers as they developed their thinking and practice together, sharing ideas and co-constructing good early years pedagogy. When everyone comes together, there is a great deal of knowledge and experience in the room to share; the group/community can learn from one another. It is certainly true that “No one knows as much as all of us” (McNicoll, 2008); together the group can generate a huge amount of thinking.

There is a research element to this, where you can pose questions about what you want to explore and find out. In our case, it was children’s mathematical development, but the process is the same for any inquiry. It is called research-in-action but is more commonly known as practitioner action research, research-based-pedagogy or practitioner inquiry, where:

Teachers/practitioners make opportunities to ‘really deeply’ look at what is ‘going on’ in their settings/schools including observation of children and talking about their thinking through pedagogical conversations.

(Peacock, 2018)

This kind of in-practice, evidenced-based research keeps the focus in everyday, meaningful, contexts, with those involved observing, investigating, exploring, enquiring, questioning and reflecting on what is happening by asking questions such as:

• Why are we doing this?
• Why are we doing it this way?
• What difference will it make?

For example, one of the everyday practices we should all be familiar with is observation, but would we recognise this process of watching children to find out what they are doing and learning as a form of research? In TFMM narrative observation, using learning stories was one of our key tools for research, which ultimately helped us to identify when children were displaying mastery orientation, as well as many other things.

Figure 1.1 Process of practitioner inquiry used in the New Zealand Educational Leadership Projects

In academic fields, this kind of research is known as ‘grounded theory’ where evidence is gathered ‘in action’ at ground level and used to inform thinking, alongside looking at wider research and informed theories. This, in effect, triangulates the whole process and strengthens the development of pedagogy and practice. It is a highly reflective process which is used widely in the New Zealand educational leadership projects (Figure 1.1) where schools and early years settings, as part of the Education Ministry’s Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI Programme, www.tlri.org.nz/tlri-research), follow a yearly research focus, supported by an external mentor and then disseminate the outcomes nationally and internationally (Carr and Lee, 2012).

Practitioner(s) gather information about their current practice through observation and various other strategies (see the following section on ‘tools’ and strategies); they look for further evidence from research, and they also find out about theories which relate to the aspect of inquiry. These are all brought together, shared, discussed and analysed through reflection, collaboration and co-construction, pulling out the threads and ideas to develop stronger, effective early years practice. This can lead to the development of wider thinking, practice and writing, which is exactly what happened with the TFMM initiative.

The TFMM initiative involved everyone in this reflective process through:

• working collaboratively as a community of learners
• talking, discussing and thinking together – engaging in our own sustained shared thinking (SST)
• having time to reflect together on what we do and why we do it that way
• sharing practice, ideas, stories
• co-constructing good practice
• making partnerships, networks, support, buddying, solidarity, friendships

Communities of practice do not have to be as large as the TFMM group, they can be much smaller, for example, staff in a setting, nursery and reception class, or working together with a colleague. What makes a huge difference though, is that you have the backing from your manager, head teacher, foundation stage coordinator or key lead person, as this will be a crucial support to help you change and embed new practice.

How to get started with Talk for Maths Mastery

Starting any kind of initiative or project can be a bit overwhelming in deciding what to do first and how to get going. So, as with children’s starting points, begin where you are ‘at’, find out what you are already doing well, what you know and how successful it is. Then you can build on firm foundations.

There are various ways of taking stock and gathering evidence of where you are, stepping back to reflect on practice and having time to investigate, explore and examine what you are doing. Kolb (1984) refers to this as a cycle of reflection; as you reflect on an experience, consider how effective or worthwhile the experience is and think about what to do next (Figure 1.2a).

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Detailed Contents
• Introduction
• 1 What is Talk for Maths Mastery?
• 2 Maintaining the momentum of children’s mathematical development
• 3 What does mathematical mastery mean for young children?
• 4 Documenting children’s mathematical talking and thinking through observation, learning stories and floor books
• 5 Building mathematical thinking through whole-class child-led learning
• 6 Making their mathematical mark: understanding and supporting children’s mathematical mark-making and thinking
• 7 How do adults support children’s mathematical talk, thinking and mastery?
• 8 Maintaining children’s mathematical momentum into Year 1 – a case study
• Final thoughts
• Appendices
• List of figures
• References
• Index