Bilingual education, effective teaching, meaningful PD and more...

If we get right into it, what does effective maths teaching look like to you?

You know, it's such an interesting question because it sounds, if you're speaking to someone who isn't in education, they'd be thinking of such a blindingly obvious question that doesn't even need to be asked.

You wouldn't really think of asking a doctor, like, what does it mean to be good at your job? It should seem so obvious, doesn't it? I think that's the biggest problem in education, that that question does have to be asked, that it is pertinent.

When you dig into it a bit and just kind of peel back the layers a little bit, you realise your own biases are coming out a wee bit.

We all have bits of baggage and our values that we kind of hold on to.

If you were to ask maybe 10 different teachers what it means to be effective in their domain, you're going to get 10 very different answers on that.

So much signal noise about it, it gets quite political at times.

It's just a complete hot potato over here at times as well.

But I would try to define it as best as I can as faculty teaching is you are directly bringing about the maximum amount of learning for the most number of pupils possible in your class.

I guess that then begs the question of what we think learning is.

And as we've encountered a lot in our work in the curriculum review, It's not as simple as it looks like, I would say, basically, to be an effective maths teacher.

And in the primary sector, where we're both from, every teacher is a maths teacher.

So we're trying to drive long-term memory change in the pupils.

So we're trying to make sure, because of their time with us as a teacher, there are things that at the end of their journey with you, they now know or can do that I guess they weren't able to do or didn't know before that.

And I think that's probably the closest I would hold that.

I think Dan Williams was over in Northern Ireland recently, wasn't he? I mean, do you think that's going to be...

Are many people on board with that definition? Because it definitely got a lot of pushback in the early...

maybe early 2010s in England, where it was like, you know, there was definitely one, like you say, it can get political.

It was a reasonably pointed conversation about whether or not that was the definition.

I mean, what do you think the reception has been like for that?

I think there's a couple of things.

There's a lot of moving parts in this.

I think most people, in my experience, would agree with that.

I think it's just, there's a certain amount of space in the whole orbit and the whole, in the whole kind of discussion around this.

And it feels possibly some of the pushback that we get on that is maybe that I see what's happening here.