Refreshing numeracy skills

Seeing children engaged and enthusiastic about maths is one of the most satisfying outcomes of teachers receiving a ‘refresher’ of their numeracy teaching skills, according to Paremata principal Bryce Coleman.

Paremata School has contracted Accent Learning’s numeracy specialists Jeremy Bloomfield and Helen Goldblatt to impart the latest techniques in teaching the maths curriculum to its staff.

“We had a number of new staff and it had been a while since they’d done numeracy training,” Bryce says.

“We wanted to have a refresher for all staff and really get everyone on the same page as far as their knowledge of delivering the curriculum went.”

He says it was a case of looking at lesson structures – planning the lesson, the introduction, asking “what does a quality lesson look like? What’s the main guts of the lesson, what’s the objective?”

“It’s led to an improvement in both lesson delivery and student engagement. It’s upskilled both our numeracy leaders and our teachers."

Helen and Jeremy’s advice includes using ‘hot spots’ at the beginning of a lesson – focussing on a weakness area that the majority of the children have and then working on that on a daily basis.

Bryce said they brought new ideas, processes and systems that teachers hadn’t experienced before - new ways of doing things.

“They showed the teachers a lot of ice-breaking games to start the maths lesson – new games that they could use in the classroom which worked really well.

“This improved the engagement hugely.”

Bryce said the whole purpose of the PLD was to get all teachers to the same standard of lesson structure and delivery – next year they are going to focus on weaknesses in student achievement in mathematics.

“What we want is consistency in curriculum delivery from class to class – that’s where the gaps were - there were gaps in the knowledge of the teachers.”

He says the advantage of using external advisers is that you know you’re working with maths curriculum experts, “and it’s an affirmation to your numeracy leaders that they’re on the right track”.

“I’ve seen already that the confidence of the teachers to deliver the numeracy project has increased – there’s been definite benefits straight off.

“It’s led to an improvement in both lesson delivery and student engagement. It’s upskilled both our numeracy leaders and our teachers.

“We all found it a very positive experience - it went brilliantly – it went so well they’re coming back next year.”