Despoina is Get Further’s Maths CPD Manager and had the privilege of working with 10 FE maths departments across the country – delivering four workshops to each team – over the 25/26 academic year. As someone with extensive experience teaching maths in FE colleges, in many of the discussions that emerged during the workshops Despoina kept finding herself relating directly to what FE maths teachers were experiencing.
I remember standing at the front of my maths classroom on a Thursday afternoon and I could see that the topic of the week hadn’t fully landed, with a few students still stuck on last week’s idea. But the scheme of learning said it was time to move on to the next topic, so I moved on. I told myself I would catch them later and re-explain it. I rarely had the time to do so…
I have thought about that afternoon a lot this year as I was running CPD workshops for maths teachers across the 10 FE colleges, and if there is one thing that’s come up regularly, it is this: the gap between the lesson you plan to teach and the lesson you actually have time to teach well. Hearing it from teacher after teacher, I recognised it instantly. It was not a new problem I was discovering. It was my own classroom, over and over again, in other people’s words. It’s not due to a lack of care: the teachers with whom I worked this year are some of the most committed people I have met, people who think about their students long after the lesson ends. The gap comes from somewhere else: a curriculum that must be covered, a timetable that doesn’t bend, and a culture in education that too often rewards pace over understanding. So what can truly help?
Notice more
The first thing I noticed is small and almost obvious once you see it. Teaching well is more than simply knowing more content, it’s about noticing more. Noticing who is stuck. Noticing how a piece of feedback needs to be given to change what a student thinks and does next. These are quiet skills. They do not show up on a scheme of learning. But they are the skills that let a teacher slow down for the student who needs it, without losing the rest of the room. When teachers are given space and time to practise exactly this, something shifts and students’ learning experience transforms.
Teacher interaction makes change more likely
The second thing that surprised me was that I would assume that time was the main thing standing between a workshop and real change in the classroom – dedicated CPD time, a free period, an inset day, a bit of breathing room to try things out. Time matters, and its absence is real. Teachers mentioned this often. But time on its own did not explain who tangibly and consciously refined their teaching practice. What, in these cases, made the difference was smaller and more humane: a head of department who asked how it went. A colleague available to try an idea out loud with before implementing it with a class. A sense that someone, somewhere, cared whether it worked. That’s the part worth holding onto. Good teaching doesn’t grow in isolation. It grows in staffrooms, in ten-minute conversations, in departments where someone notices and asks. If you are a teacher, that might mean seeking that conversation out rather than waiting for it to find you. If you lead a department, it might mean asking yourself, honestly, whether you are the person creating that space and time or the person assuming someone else will.
Something a teacher said in one of my final workshops has stayed with me since. She said: “We talk a lot about student anxiety, about maths anxiety. We rarely talk about teacher anxiety.” It had me thinking a lot and it has stayed with me because it points at something I think we forget too easily. We spend so much energy asking how to make students more confident, more motivated, more curious and more willing to have a go at a maths problem. But a stressed, unsupported teacher cannot pass on confidence and enthusiasm they don’t feel themselves. If we want engaged, motivated students, the work must start earlier than the classroom. It must start with teachers who feel trusted, capable, and genuinely cared for.
All these hold true of maths teaching everywhere, in every FE college. The pressure to cover the curriculum isn’t going away. Neither is the shortage of time. But I saw several times that neither of those things needs to be the last word. A teacher who is trusted, supported, and given the chance to talk about their practice will question their choices in an effort to refine their teaching practice and provide a better learning experience for their students and that is not despite the pressure, but often because someone helped carry it with them.
That unfinished Thursday afternoon lesson doesn’t have to end the way it usually does. Somewhere, a head of department can ask a simple question at the end of the week. Somewhere, a teacher can decide that this time, they will go back and finish the thought. Small moments. But they are those moments that make maths teaching get better, one classroom, one conversation, at a time.
Despoina supports leaders and teachers to improve their maths teaching every day. To discover more about Get Further’s CPD and how you can support quality and improvement in your department, click here.