To showcase what’s possible for students who have cracked the times table code, Bruno Reddy OBE recently hosted an event in Sydney that saw eight top-performing primary students from New Zealand battle it out against eight Australian counterparts via a range of inventive games and puzzles.
Erica Stanford, New Zealand’s Education Minister who has been leading a huge system-wide shift to the science of learning, and Subash Chandar, an Auckland maths teacher and popular YouTuber who won the Local Hero of the Year at last year's New Zealander of the Year Awards, were there to witness students’ maths mastery play out.
“I joke that he's like the NZ version of Eddie Woo,” Reddy says of Chandar.
“He jokes that Eddie Woo is the Australian version of him.”
Reddy says there is now clear alignment between Australia and New Zealand when it comes to maths teaching and the importance of a knowledge-rich curriculum.
“I think the minister and her team from the New Zealand Ministry of Education saw exactly the fruits of their policy changes, in terms of heading towards a knowledge-rich curriculum and really being able to support the kids to take maths further than usual,” he tells EducationHQ.
Reddy, a former maths teacher from Britain and founder/CEO of Maths Circle, has been vocal on the dangers of leaving children to learn their times tables by chance in primary school.
Without a solid mastery of the times tables, accessing maths at higher levels is like trying to read without knowing how to decode, he says.
“The main thing that we're trying to showcase is that once you know the tables, there's all this maths that it opens up.
“We go fast to go slow, and try to get that recall really quick so that it gets out of the way, and when it comes to the problem solving, the reasoning, the strategizing, it actually opens up the door to a lot of fun puzzles and games which are satisfying in themselves.
“And so that's what the event was [all about]. It wasn't about needing to be quick, it was about what you can do now that you are.”
Earlier this month ACARA announced a targeted review of the Australian F-2 mathematics curriculum was underway to address poor numeracy standards amongst primary students, with the inclusion of explicit content on foundational mathematics for consumer and financial literacy proving a controversial new focus.
The most recent NAPLAN data shows that around one in three Australian Year 3 students are failing to reach challenging but achievable numeracy proficiency standards, and one in ten are in need of additional support.
Reddy has been impressed by the policy changes and school improvement agenda that Stanford has been spearheading across New Zealand, and especially in maths.
“They have placed great emphasis on students acquiring knowledge well as skills, but now they're placing a greater emphasis on knowledge acquisition and defining that knowledge in their curriculum refresh.
“They've been quite specific about the tables that the students need to learn each year, and in a way they weren't as explicit before. And that - to use the word 'explicit again' - kids need to be taught explicitly what the different tables are, not just kind of left to chance or left to osmosis…”
When it comes to leading this kind of change at scale, New Zealand has got a distinct advantage, Reddy says.
“The benefit that New Zealand has is that [its school system falls under] one federal education general directive and curriculum.
“Whereas in Australia, everything gets put into the context for each state. And so, in terms of rolling stuff out and making change, New Zealand has got the easier job - and it's been very effective.”
Yet Australia’s move to the evidence about what works best in the classroom has largely been driven by grassroots organisations, the likes of Think Forward Educators, Sharing Best Practice and ResearchED, Reddy adds.
Reddy recently presented at ResearchED Ballarat where he took delegates through the instructional hierarchy of the times tables.
