Introducing Week 4

Welcome to Week 4!

This week we will focus on one final Asian Maths principle, namely the key role of practice. We’ve all heard the expression ‘practice makes perfect’!

In previous weeks, you have learned about some good principles to use in your classrooms. To make use of these, you also need a support structure and facilities that allow you to successfully acquire and adopt the principles. For example, you need sufficient time to prepare your classrooms. It also can be very useful to collaborate with other teachers. These things can be facilitated by supportive heads of department and leadership. We can see that in high-performing countries these things are quite well organised. A key question for us then might be how these countries do this.

In this fourth and last week, we will demonstrate this by describing how Shanghai, Singapore and Japan have organised their support structures for teachers. We will show that it is not just a case of good ideas but that the whole education system is built around the professional development of teachers.