CoL Inquiry 2025 - Part Seven (Finale)

 When I began my journey as a primary school teacher five years ago, I was terrified of teaching maths.  As a student, numbers scared me, and my biggest gripe with word problems was figuring out why a person would own 342 watermelons in the first place.

In my first year, though, I noticed something interesting. The students who struggled weren’t those who could calculate, but the ones who couldn't decode the word problems. Their fundamental barrier to success was not the math; it was the language.

To address this, last year, I introduced a neo-traditional approach to my teaching, borrowing elements from traditional and combining them with more contemporary approaches to improve conceptual understanding. This year, I wanted to focus on how we make sense of word problems in a more explicit way.

Our adoption of the Pr1me Maths program gave us an incredible framework, clear vocabulary, and the CPA approach. However, it quickly illustrated that our students were still having difficulty with the phrasing and unfamiliar terminology.

To tackle this, my first focus was to be deliberate and consistent in the language I used when teaching concepts. Answers were no longer answers; they were sums, differences, quotients and products. We didn’t “carry” or “borrow” I“regrouped.” This consistency helped my students feel more secure in making sense of the problems.

Secondly, I focused on making word problem solving a literacy task. We worked to identify what was being asked of them by using the “3 Reads Protocol” strategy, which forces students to slow down.

• What is the problem about? (Just the story, no numbers.)

• What is the problem asking? (Focus on the question.)

• What are the important numbers? (Identify the facts.)
  

This helped them move away from just hunting for keywords and their compulsion to calculate. I also created a guide book to help them categorise questions and apply the correct strategies, which further reinforced this new approach.

To test the efficacy of these deliberate changes, I used a customised eAsttle test and compared the results to the start of the year. The data provided powerful validation.

While the results didn't show a massive stanine shift, they showed a significant positive shift in their foundational understanding. When the language is direct—'solve,' 'model,' or 'find a rule'—the students now execute confidently. 

My focus group who initially struggled with single-step problems were now successfully translating those narratives into solvable equations. We built that language bridge for foundational skills.

However, the test also confirmed where the challenges lie next. The language barrier increases when the concepts become more abstract and the problems require multiple steps.

In order to continue building on this I will use explicit literacy strategies to pre-teach the conceptual and translational vocabulary before we extend deeply into a new topic. We will critically def
ine and understand the terms needed first.

The goal remains simple: to improve and grow their mathematical literacy so they can tackle new concepts with greater confidence. The journey continues, but I feel very confident that we are on the right path.