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Department-initiated change

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Abstract

This paper reports the activity of three secondary school mathematics departments in England in self-initiated states of change that led to overall improvements in students’ achievements when compared to previous cohorts. This took place without intervention and without their participation in external projects. They provide examples of departments that can work effectively on their own development, and hence, their work adds to our knowledge of the potential for development through collaboration. The departments were monitored over 3 years, and data were analysed using the lens of activity theory. In contrast to departments in many studies, these departments worked overtly on mathematics pedagogy through the shared production and discussion of resources, shared planning and task design. Also in contrast to several other studies, they developed distinct ways to handle differences of subject knowledge among the teachers in the department. Their focus changed during the study from developing resource banks to supporting students’ learning through hybrid teaching.

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Notes

  1. Our first task was to report what the departments did for a professional audience so we exploited the possibilities of multi-layered text on a website to report data summaries in fine detail (www.cmtp.co.uk).

  2. See Watson and De Geest (2010) for more information about tasks.

  3. For example: Association of Teachers of Mathematics (www.atm.org.uk); SMILE (www.nationalstemcentre.org.uk/elibrary/collection/44/smile); Cognitive Acceleration in Mathematics (www.cognitiveacceleration.co.uk/)

Abbreviations

HoD:

Head of department

HoDs:

Heads of department

PLAS:

Previously low attaining students

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Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to the teachers, the students and their schools who participated in this project. This work is funded by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, grant ED 05-1638. Views expressed in this paper are those of the researchers and not of the foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Anne Watson

  2. The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

    Els De Geest

Authors
  1. Anne Watson
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  2. Els De Geest
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Els De Geest.

Appendix 1

Appendix 1

1.1 Example of research instrument used in year 2 influenced by our analysis of year 7

Interview questions for CMTP teachers year 2006–7 (year 8 cohort):

  1. 1.

    What are the department aims for year 8 this year?

  2. 2.

    Describe the year 8 group you are teaching this year

  3. 3.

    What are your aims for this group?

  4. 4.

    How do you know if you are being successful?

  5. 5.

    In what ways would you like them to be more mathematical?

  6. 6.

    What sort of task and questions do you give them to help them become more mathematical?

  7. 7.

    What other types of task and question do you give and for what purpose?

  8. 8.

    Where do you get ideas, resources, materials for year 8?

  9. 9.

    Have there been any changes this year in your teaching generally; your teaching for year 8? Compare your teaching for year 7 last year and year 8 this year

Teachers’ questionnaire

Statements about the department

As a team we discuss how to …………………………

We work as a team to ……………………………….

We work individually to ……………………………….

Please tell us about something you do which you think is contrary to what the department as a whole has agreed to do.

Please give the following statements a mark out of 5, where 5 means high agreement and 0 means no agreement.

We all teach year 8 in similar ways

We all teach year 8 in different ways

We are concerned about basics

We are concerned about mathematical thinking

We are concerned about behaviour

We are concerned about parents’ attitudes

We are concerned about informal/formative assessment

We are concerned about formal/summative assessment

We do maths together

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Watson, A., De Geest, E. Department-initiated change. Educ Stud Math 87, 351–368 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-014-9549-z

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