What I used to think
How much influence do I have over my students’ feelings and motivations about mathematics?
To be honest, this is a question I had never really considered all that deeply. I saw it as my responsibility to try to teach my students to the best of my abilities in a safe learning environment, all whilst being a positive role model. I think I even said this in a job interview once.
The problem was, I did not have the slightest clue what being a positive role model actually meant.
Sources of inspiration
My takeaway
We have seen how the careless use of real-life maths may not cause students to value a topic or concept any higher, and hence is unlikely to contribute positively to their levels of motivation. However, there may be a way we can help students value the subject of mathematics as a whole.
A conclusion Middleton and Spanias (1999) reach in their comprehensive review of research is that ‘motivations toward mathematics are developed early, are highly stable over time, and are influenced greatly by teacher actions and attitudes’. In particular they find that:
I have come to the realisation that, as their maths teacher, I am possibly the only positive mathematical role model in many of my students’ lives. Sadly, students are likely to be surrounded by maths-haters or maths-avoiders. This is unsurprising, given what we have learned about maths anxiety in the previous chapter, together with the portrayal of maths in much of the media as a challenging, abstract subject accessible only to geniuses and weirdos. An overwhelming number of parents will openly announce in front of me and their children at Parents’ Evening that they were never good at maths themselves. A significant proportion of a student’s friends may tell them maths is the subject they hate the most. Indeed, in a 2016 survey, Greany et al found that the proportion of pupils who reported that they do not like learning maths was 17% at Year 5, and 48% at Year 9. As both Middleton and Spanias (1999) and the work of Boaler (2015) suggest, students may even encounter negative messages from the maths teachers they have had over the years, which has the potential to cause long-lasting damage. In short, the sole witness for the defence in the trial against maths is me, their current teacher, and I need to up my game.
I need to portray maths in the best possible light. But that alone is not enough. I also need to create a learning environment that is conducive to the enjoyment of a subject that many students do find a challenge.
What I do now
I am far more aware of the power I have to influence my students’ perceptions of mathematics, and as the great philosopher Ben Parker (Spiderman’s uncle) once said, with great power comes great responsibility. Therefore, I see it as my responsibility, not just to teach my students maths to the best of my abilities, but to be an actively positive role model in their learning of the subject. This is likely to help them value mathematics more, and hence be more motivated to succeed in it.
So, I have created a set of Golden Rules that I try my best to stick to with every single class I teach, no matter their age or set, or what topic I am teaching them:
1. I am empathetic, not apologetic
I empathise with students when they are struggling with a particular concept or topic. I explain that I often struggle myself – when I make a mistake in a lesson (which only happens about 78% of the time these days), I make sure all the students are aware of this, so they see that everyone struggles and it is perfectly normal to make mistakes. But I never, ever, ever apologise for asking them do mathematics, no matter how challenging or dull (in their opinion) it may be. Apologising is neither right nor sustainable. It leads to an unhealthy dynamic whereby my students have the upper hand, and I need to keep providing external rewards in an attempt to buy their effort – and as we shall see later in this chapter, this is unlikely to work in the long-term. Furthermore, it is simply draining. As I know from losing many arguments with my wife, saying sorry is tiring, and teaching is tiring enough without this extra burden. Lemov (2015) sums all this up in his strategy Without Apology: ‘embrace – rather than apologise for – rigorous content, academic challenge, and the hard work necessary to scholarship’.
2. I never hide my love of maths…from anyone
I am a geek. I flipping love maths. I did not have the guts to say that for much of my adolescence, desperate as I was to fit in with my peers. Likewise, for the first few years of my teaching career, I tended to hide this love away. Perhaps somewhat tellingly, I did not do this from all students. When teaching top sets, I would revel in my geekiness, surrounded as I often was by enough like-minded people to feel like I was in the majority with my passions. But give me a middle set of Year 11s – one populated by stereotypical football-loving lads and girls whose top priority from Monday morning onwards was to start planning where they were going out on Friday night – and I was more likely to play down my love of maths, admitting that it can be dull, and a struggle, but it is just something they have to do, especially if they want to pass the exam. But what good is that really doing them? Sure, it might make them like me a little more for that lesson and get me (at best) an extra 10 minutes of effort from them. But teenagers see through dishonesty more easily than anyone else, and in the long run I feel it is better for everyone if I admit I love maths and try to do my best to show my students, no matter who they are, exactly why. Not every student will come around to my way of thinking, many will think me mad, others may pity me. However, I feel more will trust and respect me because of it, which can only be beneficial for our long-term relations and their subsequent achievement.
Now, there will be maths teachers reading this who did not like maths when they were a school, and for whom extolling the wonders of the subject would be just as false as me claiming I do not get quite the thrill from simplifying a particularly challenging algebraic fraction. And such teachers will probably always have an advantage over the likes of me as they can understand students’ frustrations and empathise with their struggles in a way that I will probably never be able to do, no matter how many mathematically reluctant students I work with. But I still believe that for these teachers the message they communicate needs to be a clear one and a positive one: okay, maths can be difficult, I found it difficult, but look at me now, I teach it, I enjoy it, I can do it, and you can too.
3. If I dislike a topic, I don’t show it
Mathematics is a huge topic, few people are good at all aspects of it, and fewer people – even self-confessed geeks like me – enjoy all aspects of it. Keep this quiet, but I flipping hate 3D trigonometry. Any time the question asks for the angle between the line and the plane, I am pretty much reduced to guessing, unable to spot the relevant 2D right-angled triangle. I also find compound measures a little bit on the dull side, and do not get me started on the torture that is A Level mechanics. But I try my very best not to convey these negative feelings to my students. Sure, I will admit that I find certain parts of maths tough, but I try to never let my enthusiasm for the subject falter. For if I did – given the influence the research suggests teachers have – it would unfairly taint the topic or concept in the minds of my students. I am sure that there have been several students for whom I have permanently diminished their enjoyment of friction and kinematics, but no more!
4. If someone laughs or is in anyway nasty about another student’s mistake, I go mental
I rarely shout in lessons. If a student messes around, then I prefer a stern look and (in my eyes, at least) a spine-chilling whisper of ‘see me at the end’. However, if a child dares to snigger, snort, sniff or in any other way indicate their derision towards another child’s answer, then they are for it. And this will not be a quiet word. Oh no, I will ensure every other student knows exactly why Mr Barton is currently going red in the face. I will argue later in this chapter that I feel that I have, in the past, encouraged mistakes too much, but that does not mean I do not value the identification and resolution of mistakes as a key part of the learning process, and it certainly does not mean that I want to discourage students from voicing an answer for fear of ridicule if it is wrong. For Lemov (2015), such teacher actions are a fundamental part of what he terms the ‘Culture of Error’. A sharing of and respect for answers, whether they be right or wrong, is a fundamental feature of any well-functioning lesson and safe learning environment, and woe betide anyone who tries to stop that.
And breathe…