“I just can’t do maths, Miss.”

How many times have I heard this complaint from one of my students? Too many to count. This time, however, I have the perfect comeback.

“We’re not doing maths today. We’re doing something else,” I tell the learner.

Unfortunately, maths denial - in which students believe they simply aren’t capable of “doing” maths - is all too common. In society as a whole, it seems broadly acceptable to admit that you can’t do maths, in a way that it would never be acceptable to admit that you can’t “do reading”.

It is crucial that we overcome this attitude if we are to support our students to achieve their potential. We know from two decades of research that where learners have difficulty engaging with maths, focus is lost, behaviour worsens and attendance drops. According to Ashcraft (2002), anxiety in maths leads to a passive “presenteeism”.

Based on this, our action research team came up with a solution: instead of focusing on teaching maths, we would focus on teaching people.

I am the action research lead at Weston College for the Centres for Excellence in Maths (CfEM) programme. Our research group, which is made up of educators from across the South West of England, including teachers from South Devon, Heart of Worcestershire, Yeovil, Hartpury and South Gloucester and Stroud colleges, has been meeting regularly to think about how we can go about dismantling maths denial.

We settled on an investigation using “incisive questions” to improve learner agency, an approach drawn from the “thinking environment” work of Nancy Kline (2009) and others.

Incisive questions delve deep into the barriers that learners face. For example, you might ask “What am I assuming that is limiting my thinking here?” followed by “Is that assumption true?”

The idea is that through answering a series of questions along these lines, learners are able to dismantle their own barriers by visualising their end goal, identifying potential blockages and making a plan to overcome them.

We called the structured process “diving-deep questions”. Learners worked with each other to unpick the assumptions they were making about why they couldn’t do maths. They then developed personal targets that would help them to overcome their issues.

At first, we faced plenty of resistance to this new way of working. Investing in conversations, rather than immediately getting stuck into some maths, was a new way of approaching lessons - and in pressured maths resit environments, this was a big investment in time. However, conversations soon opened up as learners grew in confidence.

During the incisive questioning, the team found that learners were getting beyond their fear and self-doubt to unpack the often practical barriers they faced. Many said that maths was being squeezed out owing to the pressure they faced from their vocational studies; others requested support as they realised their home lives were not conducive to studying. A significant number of learners, particularly young men, admitted that they were stopping themselves from achieving their maths goal by messing around in class or turning up late.

This was an important moment. You can tell learners that their behaviour is affecting their learning until the cows come home, but until they reach that moment of realisation for themselves, nothing changes. Taking time to listen to learners unpacking their assumptions puts the onus back on them to figure out what’s going wrong. They can then come up with solutions in the form of targets.

There was a palpable change in learning for all when some of the young men abruptly altered their behaviour, stopped turning up late and took the activities more seriously. The learning culture in the classroom changed. Learners began to look forward to the questions and discussed how motivational they found the new way of learning.

After each questioning session, learners were asked to complete an online form to assess their confidence. Although many found the constant drip of these feedback forms annoying, they admitted that it reminded them to check their targets.

So, what outcomes have we seen?

Owing to lockdown, there was a limited amount of data. However, 72 per cent of learners said they had worked on their target and, of those, 80 per cent felt more confident in maths as a result.

Lockdown was frustrating in many ways because it interrupted our research in this area. The sudden shift to home working meant that data remained locked in classrooms and, of course, there will be no resit exams this year: that means we can’t ultimately check the effectiveness of our intervention on students’ grades.

What we do know is that there has been a positive impact on focus, behaviour and attendance. We have also learned a lot from the process of implementing these approaches.

Previous studies (eg, Duckworth et al, 2013) have suggested that having conversations with learners around desired and feasible futures could be translated into goals that individuals commit to. However, as our action research team found, that is easier said than done without a structure.

Constructing and asking the incisive questions, on the other hand, became an intentional part of classroom practice in a way that would be hard to realise with more loosely focused conversations. It’s a very structured process and, because of that, it needs planning in. And because it’s planned in, it happens.

The thinking environment is a simple but very disciplined practice, which relies on certain rules being followed, such as not interrupting someone while they are thinking. It requires a change of pace and the confidence of teachers completing the incisive questions work was directly proportional to the amount of training they had received on using the thinking environment.

Like maths, the thinking environment won’t work if you don’t do it properly. Pressured working environments meant that some members of the action research group found it difficult to commit to the training sessions we put on around using incisive questions, and naturally this led to a lack of confidence when it came to working in this unusual but very effective way.

We have certainly learned that in any future roll-out, we need to ensure that teachers are committed to learning the discipline of constructing incisive questions in a thinking environment. If a college wanted to do anything similar, I would recommend not skimping on the staff training element; it will pay dividends in the end.

Our CfEM action research team now hopes to take our research further post-lockdown. We’ve got some of the answers; we know that identifying their own barriers through incisive questions is powerfully motivating for learners, even when they are initially resistant to this new way of working. But we need to assess the impact on longer-term motivation and engagement.

We also want to think through how best to engage colleagues in this new approach. But it’s clear that slowing the classroom pace down to really ask learners what it is that’s getting in their way (and listening to their answers) is proving very effective. And that means that “I just can’t do maths, Miss” won’t be students’ go-to excuse for too much longer.

Katheryn Cockerton is action research lead at Weston College

This article originally appeared in the 31 July 2020 issue under the headline “Dive in to save your learners from maths denial”