How I Wish I'd Taught Maths: Lessons learned from research, conversations with experts, and 12 years of mistakes

by Craig Barton

Imagine that you are the Year 8 teacher who has inherited my class of students brought up on a diet of ‘I am thinking of a number’. What do you do? Well, your only real option is to teach students another way of solving linear equations that works for these new types of questions – probably some variant of the balance method. Then you have two choices: either tell students to abandon their old way, which they will probably be reluctant to do as it is so easy, and miles better than the new, tricky way you are trying to teach them; or give them a complex set of rules which enables them to spot which questions require which methods, which effectively means they need a different schema for each variation, and maths quickly becomes the disparate set of meaningless rules that countless scores of children and adults view it as. Either way, you are likely to be fighting a losing battle, and it is undoubtedly all my fault.