LEaDME: Leading Educators and Development in Mathematics Education

This post builds on my previous one about points of intervention. I wanted to share some advice about positioning and directing your leadership activity as a school maths leader using a mathematics leadership activity plan (MLAP). This post is motivated by recent work with two maths leaders who are leading maths innovation in their primary school in rural New South Wales.

I was fortunate to work with the maths leaders in their school, as well as work with the teachers in professional learning meetings. Towards the end of the two days at the school, I met with the maths leaders to plan ways forward for the rest of the school year. We talked about ways that the maths leaders could direct their work in leading professional learning for teachers.

Here is the MLAP that the two maths leaders created as a result of our leadership meeting discussion.

At the leadership meeting, we discussed possibilities for the leaders’ activity for the rest of the school year (Term 4, 2018). We finally agreed that, as a school, the teachers could focus on ways to engage students more in classroom talk where students had to convince others of their mathematical thinking. After further discussion, the maths leaders decided that a focus on developing teacher questioning techniques that promoted students’ convincing practices would be the direction of their leadership work.

Before we progressed with documenting the plan, the maths leaders and I read a section from Principles to Actions (NCTM, 2014). We focused on the section devoted to purposeful questioning. This opportunity for professional reading was important as it provided further information about the importance of teacher questions. It also confirmed for the maths leaders that a focus on questioning that promotes convincing in maths lessons was an important focus for their leadership activity.

The process for completing the MLAP template started with writing the success indicator. This indicator was written for the maths leaders but you will notice that it is situated in the work of the classroom teachers. The main question I posed to the maths leaders when developing this indicator was: What do the teachers do as a result of your leadership influence?

Once the maths leaders had decided on their success indicator, they both brainstormed possible leadership actions, deciding which ones were achievable for the school term. They then spent time developing a sequence for those actions, prioritising those that could be enacted almost immediately after our leadership meeting.

The rest of the MLAP was written by using the focus questions that are part of the plan template. The writing of the MLAP was a not linear process. The two maths leaders found it easier to plan their leadership actions first, and then as they identified resources that they might need, they recorded the names of those resources in that part of the plan. The final part of the MLAP that was completed concerned the evidence sources and ways of analysing the evidence that they would collect to assess the influence of their leadership activity.

The interesting aspect of this work with these maths leaders was hearing from them a few weeks after our meeting. In an email, the leaders told me about how their MLAP positioned their work with the principal and deputy principal with greater authority. By having a plan, the leaders said that they could talk about their leadership activity with a clearer direction, and they could then discuss what they needed in terms of support from the executive leadership team at their school. The leaders told me that both the principal and deputy principal supported the plan, and made changes to the schools’ meeting schedule to accommodate the maths leaders’ plan.

As we come to the end of another school year here in Australia, I imagine that many maths leaders are thinking about their work and making plans for 2019. I believe that a mathematics leadership activity plan (MLAP; see Leadership resources section for template) can act as a powerful tool in positioning and directing our mathematics leadership activity, just as it did with the two maths leaders who inspired this post.

If you are interested in the NCTM (2014) text, the Executive Summary can be downloaded here: https://www.nctm.org/uploadedFiles/Standards_and_Positions/PtAExecutiveSummary.pdf Hard copies of the text, which is well worth the purchase, can be bought online.