I now know why everyone loves using a John Mason quote. I was listening to a Mr Barton Maths podcast where Craig (@mrbartonmaths) is interviewing Anne Watson and John Mason. These two are like the equivalent of a Jedi in Mathematics education. This particular episode caught my attention because of a book John co-authored, Thinking Mathematically, which is sitting in my Amazon basket – according to Amie Albrecht (@nomad_penguin), I just HAVE to get the 2nd Edition. If you haven’t listened to the podcast, do yourself a favour and head to Craig’s website to listen to it now. If you’re in a public space, play it nice and loud as John and Anne’s advice is pure gold. Or you can just read on.

I’ve loved every quote I’ve seen people extract from John Mason’s work – I know Dan Meyer isn’t afraid to throw John’s face up on his slides. One particular one that has stuck with me is this:

So, when John interpolates when a question is posed to Anne from Craig (around about an hour into the show) about a practical takeaway for supporting students to form conjectures in the classroom, I was curious about what he had to say…

Anne: What do you think would happen if… is the basic conjecturing sort of question.

Craig: …What have you found to be the most effective way to get the most out of these conjectures, to get the most out of the mathematical thinking we need our students to have?

John: I don’t think there is a best way. There are different ways of stimulating conjecturing. There are different ways at the beginning of the term in setting up an ethos in which it becomes part of the classroom practice that you make a conjecture and that you don’t believe your conjecture. That’s important. So, you learn to challenge other people’s conjectures, so that you can learn to challenge your own conjectures. So, conjecturing is a way of being. There isn’t a sort of a best way to make conjectures.

A little bit later on, Anne then talked about how she used an area of a kite lesson with some pre-service teachers (on a side note, there were many parallels with how she talked about the running of the lesson and the Five Practices). The focus of the lesson was to pay particular attention to the various methods used to determine which kites were bigger than others. This then prompted Craig to ask the question on everyone’s minds:

Craig: Would there be a period of so-called Direct Instruction? Where, for example, you modelled, explained and gave kids practice on how to actually work out the area of a kite and, if so, where would it have come in this sequence? Would it have come before this activity, or would it have come after this activity?… Where does Direct Instruction fit into this, if anywhere?

John: I could use that task at the beginning, or fairly early on, or in the middle, or fairly late on, or even at the end of the topic. I can actually use it anywhere, it depends on my relationship with the students, their relationship with mathematical thinking, or at least my reading, my interpretation of their relationship to thinking mathematically, and it might also depend on the weather. Seriously, if it’s raining and miserable outside, I might act differently than if it’s sunny. There are a lot of factors which could lead me to choose make use of a task at different points of their experience.

John: I don’t have a pre-this is how I do it. It’s what comes to me in the moment with my various sensitivities or insensitivities which makes me choose do it one way or another.

Anne: It depends on what your pedagogic aim is.

What really shifted my thinking here was when I considered how predetermined my teaching is. How do I know if a task is a better as an introduction to Pythagoras Theorem than it is an application lesson before I’ve even met my students? Or even that, just because it worked well for last year’s class, it ought to work well again for this year’s? I then started thinking about my lesson and unit planning as a whole, and have been since perplexed by the question, “how much is my own prejudice determining how my students learn and see mathematics?”

By considering John and Anne’s perspective of “there is no best”, it helps me bring everything I have to planning a sequence of lessons and be prepared to use the things at my disposal to support students to think mathematically and communicate effectively. Earlier on in the episode, John essentially says that he believes that he can support a student to think mathematically with pretty much any task, which further leads me to think more about what I am having the students do with what I give them, rather than thinking too much about what I give them. Instead I need to be spending my energy on considering whether I am creating a culture in my class where I’m encouraging my students to make conjectures they’re willing to test and disprove. Am I giving students time and space to think freely? Being open to simply make things work as best as possible for the conditions at the time is a far less stressful place to be – I can only talk for myself here because I know this isn’t how everyone feels about it.

This notion that, although we may think some tasks are better at the beginning, middle or end of a unit, it depends more on the context of the class than your preference of explaining before, during or after has really big implications on my practice, I feel. Hmm… lots to think about!

Now, time to click on the “checkout” button on Amazon to get this book. Happy now, Amie?