Today’s episode is prompted by a recent post on X which posed the following question:  “What do you do with your mathematics teachers while you do your whole school professional learning on literacy, reading or writing?”

Femi and Matt discuss the two main failure modes for students on ‘worded’ maths questions – noting that the more common and critical failure mode is one that won’t be addressed in a whole-school context.  They talk about the rarely considered element of ‘opportunity cost’, optimum ways of developing student ability on worded maths questions, what the maths department could actually be doing on literacy PD, the role of subject leaders in setting the tone to make this PD a success, and the implications for taking ‘literacy is everyone’s responsibility’ forward seriously.

Also discussed are the EEF guide to improving literacy in secondary schools, how we have to view the use of training time through the lens of impact, alternative and possibly more effective approaches to professional learning, the importance of identifying needs within a department and prioritising training to address those needs, and leaders having the strength and courage to take a differentiated and subject-specific approach to professional development.

Finally the conversation moves on to the importance of airing conflict, different ways of handling conflict, learning from our mistakes, getting feedback on how well our approaches have worked, the importance carefully of defining success criteria and afterwards evaluating the impact of training.

Please do join in and further the conversation - @beyondgoodpod on X