Taking Creativity Out Of Maths

There’s a time and a place for creative solutions in maths, and learning core skills isn’t one of them, says Ben Harding..

You might be wondering if you read the title of this article correctly. Am I really suggesting that children be less creative? Such a notion hardly resonates with current pedagogical thinking. Can you imagine turning up on Monday morning and exclaiming to the children: ‘No creativity today, please!’

Of course we want our classrooms to be a hotbed of creative thinking; however, there is a time and a place for creativity. The key is to distinguish between those points in the curriculum where we want children to be creative and those where we do not. We can then adapt our teaching style accordingly. One could call this ‘precision pedagogy’, i.e. when the nature of the curriculum content determines the teaching style, as opposed to focusing on individual learner’s needs or employing a generic set of effective teaching strategies.

Generally speaking, the acquisition of basic skills for reading, writing and maths is low on learner creativity (using and applying those skills in new contexts is a different matter). For example, children don’t get involved in deciding how we spell the word ‘because’, and once they have mastered the spelling, we wouldn’t then ask “Who can spell it a different way?”.

This might seem rather obvious in English, but in mathematics it’s not always fully understood. Indeed, the National Numeracy Strategy provided a legacy of classroom practice that handed over too much creativity to children. It encouraged us to ask the question, “Who can do it a different way?” at a time in children’s numeracy journey when they should still have been learning one core method – a method that asks for no creativity as far as the child is concerned.

When learning a core method, we still want the learner to think, understand and ‘do’, but we shouldn’t be inviting creativity.

Let us work through the area of subtraction as an example. The story begins before the National Strategies, a time when children typically only learnt (and solved) subtraction by going down columns. If you could do ‘borrowing’, you were away.

And then the new thinking: the old-fashioned algorithms (or ‘column methods’) were flawed; low on understanding, preventing flexible thinking and not transferable into mental methods. It was a sound rationale for change and huge benefits resulted.

But, as is often the case with such a dramatic shift in practice, an over-correction was initially made. Under the National Numeracy Strategy, children were now solving subtraction going forwards and backwards on number lines – some not knowing if they were coming or going, while others created their own multi-jump solution to every single question. As teachers, we would encourage this multi-jump approach and celebrate any ingenuity for finding a different way of solving the problem.

Marking 30 books, each with 10 questions, meant checking 300 unique responses, all with several mini-jumps that themselves needed checking. No wonder work-life balance became such a burning issue at this time. In a well-intentioned bid for high understanding and flexible thinking, the Numeracy Strategy inadvertently led us to encourage inefficiency in our children.

It is the inefficiency of such high-understanding methods (although, crucially, not all high- understanding methods are inefficient) that has rightly justified the current government to readdress the issue through the new National Curriculum.

However, there is a real risk that another over-correction is about to take place. It is vital that schools don’t interpret the new curriculum simply as a return to old-fashioned column methods. If so, we have returned to limiting our children’s numeracy understanding and flexible thinking as we did over a quarter of a century ago. In other words, it is not a polarised debate between high- understanding methods or column methods. Children should learn both. But despite the need for balance, there remains a general chronology. First come the high-understanding core methods, then the column methods (remembering that the high-understanding methods will continue to progress, since they alone lead to more advanced mental maths in a way that column methods simply do not). If one looks carefully at the new National Curriculum, all of this approach is seen built in.

The question now is whether the end-of-primary-school statutory assessments will assess competency in high-understanding mental methods and column methods. To just assess column methods would imply this is the only method that should be taught. And with that, all of the genuinely successful gains made via the National Numeracy Strategy’s approach to teaching children to be properly numerate will quickly be lost.

About the author

Ben has been working in education for over 20 years, including eight years of headship. As the creator of Big Maths he presents high-quality training in a clear, accessible and humorous way.