All-Attainment Teaching in Secondary Mathematics

Book excerpt: This book is about the promotion of all-attainment teaching in the mathematics classroom. The book contains the individual stories of six teachers working in three different schools: an inner London comprehensive with a largely working class intake, a comprehensive on the south coast and a rural comprehensive in Cambridgeshire. Each story describes and explains in brief the background of the teacher and how each came to teach all-attainment groups in mathematics. The research reported in this book is the only close examination and analysis of the practices and methodologies of successful all-attainment educators in the modern age. Three major themes are identified and examined: what sustains the teachers; how they introduce, develop and maintain all-attainment teaching; and how they make all-attainment work in the classroom. From an analysis of these findings, the book presents two interrelated models of the knowledge and understandings the research has generated. The first one is an overarching model of situation and horizon. Used as a means of visualizing and understanding the current situation for teachers, it can aid in encouraging change for the better. The second model offers teachers a way to think of all-attainment teaching as an enabler for all students, most especially for disadvantaged students. Both models have original and explanatory power and offer new ways of conceptualizing how mathematics teaching for social justice might be understood and implemented, offering fresh perspectives and unique insights. As such it will be of help to students at undergraduate, Masters and doctoral level and to education researchers more widely.