Let’s Think: building capacity, developing whole school practice

WP_Query Object ( [query] => Array ( [page] => [name] => lets-think-building-capacity-developing-whole-school-practice ) [query_vars] => Array ( [page] => 0 [name] => lets-think-building-capacity-developing-whole-school-practice [error] => [m] => [p] => 0 [post_parent] => [subpost] => [subpost_id] => [attachment] => [attachment_id] => 0 [pagename] => [page_id] => 0 [second] => [minute] => [hour] => [day] => 0 [monthnum] => 0 [year] => 0 [w] => 0 [category_name] => [tag] => [cat] => [tag_id] => [author] => [author_name] => [feed] => [tb] => [paged] => 0 [meta_key] => [meta_value] => [preview] => [s] => [sentence] => [title] => [fields] => [menu_order] => [embed] => [category__in] => Array ( ) [category__not_in] => Array ( ) [category__and] => Array ( ) [post__in] => Array ( ) [post__not_in] => Array ( ) [post_name__in] => Array ( ) [tag__in] => Array ( ) [tag__not_in] => Array ( ) [tag__and] => Array ( ) [tag_slug__in] => Array ( ) [tag_slug__and] => Array ( ) [post_parent__in] => Array ( ) [post_parent__not_in] => Array ( ) [author__in] => Array ( ) [author__not_in] => Array ( ) [search_columns] => Array ( ) [ignore_sticky_posts] => [suppress_filters] => [cache_results] => 1 [update_post_term_cache] => 1 [update_menu_item_cache] => [lazy_load_term_meta] => 1 [update_post_meta_cache] => 1 [post_type] => [posts_per_page] => 10 [nopaging] => [comments_per_page] => 50 [no_found_rows] => [order] => DESC ) [tax_query] => [meta_query] => WP_Meta_Query Object ( [queries] => Array ( ) [relation] => [meta_table] => [meta_id_column] => [primary_table] => [primary_id_column] => [table_aliases:protected] => Array ( ) [clauses:protected] => Array ( ) [has_or_relation:protected] => ) [date_query] => [queried_object] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1545 [post_author] => 2386 [post_date] => 2025-03-06 11:07:41 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-03-06 11:07:41 [post_content] => What does a professional development model for Let’s Think look like that seeks to effect whole school change and build internal capacity?  I have spent the last two terms considering this problem as I work with a primary school in West Wales to support them in embedding the Let’s Think Maths approach across their school. My thought process began by considering the challenges of whole school implementation: what makes it tricky, and why does it often take so long?  I identified three key challenges.

1. School budgets are tight. I can only spend three two day sessions at the school across the academic year (six days in total), and only a small handful of teachers can be released to work with me on those six days.
2. One of the challenges of Let’s Think Maths in the primary years is that teachers do not feel confident about their own mathematics knowledge and understanding.  This means that they tend to only teach the lessons that they have seen a tutor like me modelling and explaining.  This can leave them with a very small repertoire of lessons, given the professional development time I have with them.
3. Teachers only really feel confident with a lesson when they have taught it twice, but in the primary years, teachers tend to only teach their own class.  This means they may not develop confidence in a lesson until they teach it for the second time, the following year.

These challenges led me to consider reframing the way I think about the teachers who do attend the professional development sessions I led.  What if I am not simply preparing them to teach Let’s Think in their own classes, but also to teach Let’s Think to other teachers in the school?  To this end, teachers from different year groups were identified to take part.  The school was asked to find the time to enable these teachers to not only teach these lessons to their own classes, but to team teach each lesson with a partner teacher. This latter activity also resolved the issue of teachers taking two years to feel confident teaching a lesson: now each lesson would be taught twice in the same year, leading (hopefully) to a quicker and more confident understanding of the lessons and the approach. This approach means the teachers identified to take part in the face-to-face professional development sessions need to be a very particular kind of teacher.  They have to be willing to take risks with their practice: Let’s Think requires them to fundamentally rethink some of their ingrained teaching habits, to try something new, probably to experience initial failure, before redeveloping a new kind of expertise.  They have to have a collaborative mindset: they will need to induct their colleagues carefully into the approach, not expecting too much of them and being sensitive to teachers who might find Let’s Think very different to their normal maths teaching.  They have to be generous: they will have to spend time with colleagues supporting them to understand the approach and helping them to plan lessons.  They have to have a positive mindset: we want them to champion the approach in the school, so that colleagues believe in its potential, and they will need to respond positively to feedback from me as tutor during the live teaching we do in professional development sessions, so that they can develop expertise in the approach as quickly as possible. During each of my two day visits, I built in time to deliver some short introductory sessions to all teachers at their weekly staff meeting.  This gave all teachers an overview of the theory behind Let’s Think and the principles of the pedagogy and lesson design.  Hopefully, this would help them make sense of the team teaching they did with their colleagues. Finally, I made use of two key sets of resources to support teachers who would be working with other colleagues in my absence.  Firstly, I used the library of lesson simulations the Let’s Think Maths tutor team have been putting together on the Let’s Think Community website.  In essence, this is a way to access a tutor explaining a lesson through an interactive video, an activity that can be done collaboratively with colleagues.  This is a way to develop expertise via tutor support but without the need for the tutor to be present.  It would be a tricky resource for those new to Let’s Think to use, but can be very supportive to teachers who understand Let’s Think but want to get to know a new lesson.   Secondly, I asked the teachers I was supporting to read chapters from the Let’s Think Handbook.  This book explains the Piagetian and Vygotskian theories that underpin the design of Let’s Think lessons, and also helps teachers get a deep understanding of the core pedagogical principles: concrete preparation, cognitive conflict, social construction and metacognition.  This would help them explain to colleagues why they were implementing the approach, the difference it makes to learning and the rationale behind its design. It is early days with the professional development programme - we have the right teachers in place, they have begun to team teach, and they are definitely developing their own teaching expertise.  What is important to me is to leave the school in a place where they no longer need my services as a tutor - in essence, to make myself redundant.  That is the true test of whole school Let’s Think implementation, and I am looking forward to seeing it at the school.       [post_title] => Let’s Think: building capacity, developing whole school practice [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => lets-think-building-capacity-developing-whole-school-practice [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-03-06 11:07:41 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-03-06 11:07:41 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://letsthink.org.uk/?p=1545 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [queried_object_id] => 1545 [request] => SELECT wp_posts.* FROM wp_posts WHERE 1=1 AND wp_posts.post_name = 'lets-think-building-capacity-developing-whole-school-practice' AND wp_posts.post_type = 'post' ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC [posts] => Array ( [0] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1545 [post_author] => 2386 [post_date] => 2025-03-06 11:07:41 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-03-06 11:07:41 [post_content] => What does a professional development model for Let’s Think look like that seeks to effect whole school change and build internal capacity?  I have spent the last two terms considering this problem as I work with a primary school in West Wales to support them in embedding the Let’s Think Maths approach across their school. My thought process began by considering the challenges of whole school implementation: what makes it tricky, and why does it often take so long?  I identified three key challenges.

1. School budgets are tight. I can only spend three two day sessions at the school across the academic year (six days in total), and only a small handful of teachers can be released to work with me on those six days.
2. One of the challenges of Let’s Think Maths in the primary years is that teachers do not feel confident about their own mathematics knowledge and understanding.  This means that they tend to only teach the lessons that they have seen a tutor like me modelling and explaining.  This can leave them with a very small repertoire of lessons, given the professional development time I have with them.
3. Teachers only really feel confident with a lesson when they have taught it twice, but in the primary years, teachers tend to only teach their own class.  This means they may not develop confidence in a lesson until they teach it for the second time, the following year.

These challenges led me to consider reframing the way I think about the teachers who do attend the professional development sessions I led.  What if I am not simply preparing them to teach Let’s Think in their own classes, but also to teach Let’s Think to other teachers in the school?  To this end, teachers from different year groups were identified to take part.  The school was asked to find the time to enable these teachers to not only teach these lessons to their own classes, but to team teach each lesson with a partner teacher. This latter activity also resolved the issue of teachers taking two years to feel confident teaching a lesson: now each lesson would be taught twice in the same year, leading (hopefully) to a quicker and more confident understanding of the lessons and the approach. This approach means the teachers identified to take part in the face-to-face professional development sessions need to be a very particular kind of teacher.  They have to be willing to take risks with their practice: Let’s Think requires them to fundamentally rethink some of their ingrained teaching habits, to try something new, probably to experience initial failure, before redeveloping a new kind of expertise.  They have to have a collaborative mindset: they will need to induct their colleagues carefully into the approach, not expecting too much of them and being sensitive to teachers who might find Let’s Think very different to their normal maths teaching.  They have to be generous: they will have to spend time with colleagues supporting them to understand the approach and helping them to plan lessons.  They have to have a positive mindset: we want them to champion the approach in the school, so that colleagues believe in its potential, and they will need to respond positively to feedback from me as tutor during the live teaching we do in professional development sessions, so that they can develop expertise in the approach as quickly as possible. During each of my two day visits, I built in time to deliver some short introductory sessions to all teachers at their weekly staff meeting.  This gave all teachers an overview of the theory behind Let’s Think and the principles of the pedagogy and lesson design.  Hopefully, this would help them make sense of the team teaching they did with their colleagues. Finally, I made use of two key sets of resources to support teachers who would be working with other colleagues in my absence.  Firstly, I used the library of lesson simulations the Let’s Think Maths tutor team have been putting together on the Let’s Think Community website.  In essence, this is a way to access a tutor explaining a lesson through an interactive video, an activity that can be done collaboratively with colleagues.  This is a way to develop expertise via tutor support but without the need for the tutor to be present.  It would be a tricky resource for those new to Let’s Think to use, but can be very supportive to teachers who understand Let’s Think but want to get to know a new lesson.   Secondly, I asked the teachers I was supporting to read chapters from the Let’s Think Handbook.  This book explains the Piagetian and Vygotskian theories that underpin the design of Let’s Think lessons, and also helps teachers get a deep understanding of the core pedagogical principles: concrete preparation, cognitive conflict, social construction and metacognition.  This would help them explain to colleagues why they were implementing the approach, the difference it makes to learning and the rationale behind its design. It is early days with the professional development programme - we have the right teachers in place, they have begun to team teach, and they are definitely developing their own teaching expertise.  What is important to me is to leave the school in a place where they no longer need my services as a tutor - in essence, to make myself redundant.  That is the true test of whole school Let’s Think implementation, and I am looking forward to seeing it at the school.       [post_title] => Let’s Think: building capacity, developing whole school practice [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => lets-think-building-capacity-developing-whole-school-practice [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-03-06 11:07:41 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-03-06 11:07:41 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://letsthink.org.uk/?p=1545 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) ) [post_count] => 1 [current_post] => -1 [in_the_loop] => [post] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 1545 [post_author] => 2386 [post_date] => 2025-03-06 11:07:41 [post_date_gmt] => 2025-03-06 11:07:41 [post_content] => What does a professional development model for Let’s Think look like that seeks to effect whole school change and build internal capacity?  I have spent the last two terms considering this problem as I work with a primary school in West Wales to support them in embedding the Let’s Think Maths approach across their school. My thought process began by considering the challenges of whole school implementation: what makes it tricky, and why does it often take so long?  I identified three key challenges.

1. School budgets are tight. I can only spend three two day sessions at the school across the academic year (six days in total), and only a small handful of teachers can be released to work with me on those six days.
2. One of the challenges of Let’s Think Maths in the primary years is that teachers do not feel confident about their own mathematics knowledge and understanding.  This means that they tend to only teach the lessons that they have seen a tutor like me modelling and explaining.  This can leave them with a very small repertoire of lessons, given the professional development time I have with them.
3. Teachers only really feel confident with a lesson when they have taught it twice, but in the primary years, teachers tend to only teach their own class.  This means they may not develop confidence in a lesson until they teach it for the second time, the following year.

These challenges led me to consider reframing the way I think about the teachers who do attend the professional development sessions I led.  What if I am not simply preparing them to teach Let’s Think in their own classes, but also to teach Let’s Think to other teachers in the school?  To this end, teachers from different year groups were identified to take part.  The school was asked to find the time to enable these teachers to not only teach these lessons to their own classes, but to team teach each lesson with a partner teacher. This latter activity also resolved the issue of teachers taking two years to feel confident teaching a lesson: now each lesson would be taught twice in the same year, leading (hopefully) to a quicker and more confident understanding of the lessons and the approach. This approach means the teachers identified to take part in the face-to-face professional development sessions need to be a very particular kind of teacher.  They have to be willing to take risks with their practice: Let’s Think requires them to fundamentally rethink some of their ingrained teaching habits, to try something new, probably to experience initial failure, before redeveloping a new kind of expertise.  They have to have a collaborative mindset: they will need to induct their colleagues carefully into the approach, not expecting too much of them and being sensitive to teachers who might find Let’s Think very different to their normal maths teaching.  They have to be generous: they will have to spend time with colleagues supporting them to understand the approach and helping them to plan lessons.  They have to have a positive mindset: we want them to champion the approach in the school, so that colleagues believe in its potential, and they will need to respond positively to feedback from me as tutor during the live teaching we do in professional development sessions, so that they can develop expertise in the approach as quickly as possible. During each of my two day visits, I built in time to deliver some short introductory sessions to all teachers at their weekly staff meeting.  This gave all teachers an overview of the theory behind Let’s Think and the principles of the pedagogy and lesson design.  Hopefully, this would help them make sense of the team teaching they did with their colleagues. Finally, I made use of two key sets of resources to support teachers who would be working with other colleagues in my absence.  Firstly, I used the library of lesson simulations the Let’s Think Maths tutor team have been putting together on the Let’s Think Community website.  In essence, this is a way to access a tutor explaining a lesson through an interactive video, an activity that can be done collaboratively with colleagues.  This is a way to develop expertise via tutor support but without the need for the tutor to be present.  It would be a tricky resource for those new to Let’s Think to use, but can be very supportive to teachers who understand Let’s Think but want to get to know a new lesson.   Secondly, I asked the teachers I was supporting to read chapters from the Let’s Think Handbook.  This book explains the Piagetian and Vygotskian theories that underpin the design of Let’s Think lessons, and also helps teachers get a deep understanding of the core pedagogical principles: concrete preparation, cognitive conflict, social construction and metacognition.  This would help them explain to colleagues why they were implementing the approach, the difference it makes to learning and the rationale behind its design. It is early days with the professional development programme - we have the right teachers in place, they have begun to team teach, and they are definitely developing their own teaching expertise.  What is important to me is to leave the school in a place where they no longer need my services as a tutor - in essence, to make myself redundant.  That is the true test of whole school Let’s Think implementation, and I am looking forward to seeing it at the school.       [post_title] => Let’s Think: building capacity, developing whole school practice [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => lets-think-building-capacity-developing-whole-school-practice [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2025-03-06 11:07:41 [post_modified_gmt] => 2025-03-06 11:07:41 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://letsthink.org.uk/?p=1545 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [comment_count] => 0 [current_comment] => -1 [found_posts] => 1 [max_num_pages] => 0 [max_num_comment_pages] => 0 [is_single] => 1 [is_preview] => [is_page] => [is_archive] => [is_date] => [is_year] => [is_month] => [is_day] => [is_time] => [is_author] => [is_category] => [is_tag] => [is_tax] => [is_search] => [is_feed] => [is_comment_feed] => [is_trackback] => [is_home] => [is_privacy_policy] => [is_404] => [is_embed] => [is_paged] => [is_admin] => [is_attachment] => [is_singular] => 1 [is_robots] => [is_favicon] => [is_posts_page] => [is_post_type_archive] => [query_vars_hash:WP_Query:private] => 255cdcc7fc40a64c1573c1d96ce2ef87 [query_vars_changed:WP_Query:private] => [thumbnails_cached] => [allow_query_attachment_by_filename:protected] => [stopwords:WP_Query:private] => [compat_fields:WP_Query:private] => Array ( [0] => query_vars_hash [1] => query_vars_changed ) [compat_methods:WP_Query:private] => Array ( [0] => init_query_flags [1] => parse_tax_query ) )