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Being HoD and making change: details
At SP Anna left part-way through year 3 of the project and Jack took over. Anna left when SMT combined subject areas and wanted a generic focus in learning. Anna felt that her strength was mathematics and the specific structures, abstractions and ways of thinking that characterise mathematics. She decided that the combined role was not for her. Referring to her attempts to interpret to her team the initiatives introduced by SMT, she talked about how every teacher needs to have a sense of mathematical purpose in order to make sense of demands made on them by others. Jack took over a well-formed team with a strong shared ethos.
At FH Rickie left after the first project year and Adam took over. Adam continued with the same aims and commitments, but felt that due to staff changes his main focus had to be on developing the mathematics team and on their teaching of all students, without a special emphasis on PLAS. The devopments under his leadership mainly influenced the cohort following the project cohort. His view of his role was that the teaching of maths needed to continue to shift away from showing students how to do something, and towards driving students' ideas, responding to natural lines of enquiry but helping them get to recognisable understandings of conventional mathematics. His approach to this task was for the team to identify key ideas in mathematics and devise extended work around them.
At LS there was stable leadership throughout the project. Eric had already established a strong team with considerable shared ethos in a multi-cultural community school. In addition there was an Advanced Skills Teacher and a former middle school mathematics coordinator in the team.
All HoDs agreed that there were people in their teams who had what one HoD called 'a prejudice' about some students and claimed that 'my students cannot do X' without asking 'why don't they do X?' They were all concerned about teachers having preconceived ideas about what individuals will achieve.
Although all wanted their teams to speak with one voice to higher management and to students, they all welcomed discussion and difference of opinion within the team - one talked about 'believers' but it turned out that this meant a belief in the value of discussion, reflection on practice, learning from each other and so on.
All were concerned about those who were not around to join in informal discussions - those who didn't 'hang out'. In LS the close adherence to a common scheme of work helped with this. In SP teachers had more freedom of choice over what they taught so there were fewer obvious foci for discussion, but the HoD used honesty about her own insecurity as a way to start conversations. She said 'being a maths teacher is an identity, it's not things you do but who you are', and tried to convey this to others.
