What was your motivation to move away from streaming?

I’m really passionate about ending streaming because it was a killer for me at school – you’re either with the dummies or you were with the brainies. Thirty years later and going to university for the first time and realising I’m not dumb, and I do have a brain. And it was school that sucked that out of me.

What was the approach you took to making the shift?

It’s children teaching children and the role of the teacher is more of a facilitator. It’s about the teacher really noticing at a very deep level what the mathematics is that the children are coming out with in their conversations – this is from new entrant to Year 8.

The mathematics is all contextualised into stories that the children can recognise from their own lives- so they are talking more from a place of knowledge. If we know the church is important to them, we’ll use the church context. If we know that somebody has a big garden at home and they love gardening, we will use that. The whole mathematics curriculum, the whole lot, can be sited within stories.

Basically, we share the story, we talk about what’s happening in it, we work out what they are trying to find out and then they work on their own. As a teacher, we are just listening, and you can imagine how hard that is for us being teachers. We sit in a circle a lot. We’re looking at each other so that makes it easier for them to listen because we have this thing that if you are listening, you’re looking at the person who is talking. There are no hands up because as soon as you have hands up, immediately the teacher is in a position of power. I try to put the onus back on the kids to decide – well, do you agree, do you disagree, is that right, what do you think and why do you think that? It doesn’t take very long before they are justifying and explaining at their level, and it gets much more sophisticated the further up the school you get.

Cultural understandings are affirmed and validated. It means that any one of the kids can be the expert on the topic without even needing to know about the maths. And that raises their status, builds their mana, makes them feel that I’ve got something to offer which feeds into their self-efficacy.

The key competencies are at the forefront of the learning that the kids do. Things like relationships with others, managing yourself, participating and contributing – are a huge part of the learning that goes on in the DMIC programme.

I learn just as much from the kids, sometimes more I think than they learn from me. What I’m learning is what motivates them, what captures their attention, what excites them and that’s what I use to feed back to engage them in maths. They get all excited because it’s like they see themselves in it.

It's a fundamental non-negotiable about this pedagogy that you do not put kids together based on who is capable and who is not mathematically. The kids work mostly in pairs and basically, I’m shifting them around all the time so they’re always working with someone else, and the idea is that if somebody doesn’t work with somebody, that’s not a reason to split them, that’s more a reason for me to dig deeper and help those kids see the benefit of working with each other.

When we started, we asked children how do you feel about maths and some of the early comments we got were ‘It’s the Pākehā boys and the Asian boys and girls who are good at maths – we don’t do that, we’re not clever at maths.’ Now, they say, ‘We have so much maths in our culture. We navigated the stars and that takes mathematics. I’m Samoan and I’m good at maths.’

What does success look like?

There’s no shame if you fail because it’s a collective, but everybody shares the joy when you get it right because you all contributed. The local colleges recognise our kids speak up in maths, they take ownership, they can explain and they’re really good at showing. We’ve found that once you start using this pedagogy in maths, it tracks over into every other learning area. The flow on benefits are huge.

Further reading:

• Developing Mathematical Inquiry Communities | Education Counts
• Taking Maths into the Hearts of Communities | Education Gazette