Article content

What’s the best that parents and students can hope for with the new K-3 math curriculum? It depends.

Article content

There are both disconcerting signs and hopeful ones, with perhaps the most positive being Alberta Education teaming up with the renowned JUMP math program to provide resources and lesson plans for teachers.

JUMP math founder John Mighton, who has taught math at the University of Toronto and is an officer of the Order of Canada, started to tutor in math in 1998, working with a Grade 6 boy who had been written off as a child who could never learn math. That boy is now a university math professor.

Out of this tutoring grew JUMP, a program that uses best practices in teaching children based on modern cognitive research.

Alberta has seen a drop in math results over the past two decades. JUMP can help our children immensely, in large part because it is much different than most private math programs and consultancies that try to influence school curriculum and teachers. Most notably JUMP is a non-profit group. It’s not hyping some magic bullet in order to get massive consulting fees or sell resource materials for big money.

Article content

Mighton is free to adapt JUMP to the latest research, chucking out things that don’t work in favour of practices that do. “There’s enormous pressure to sell people what they think should work, rather than what works,” Mighton told me in an interview. “We decided from the beginning to be an evidence-based program and not to be driven by profit but by evidence.”

Every child should be able to learn math, Mighton said. “The vast majority of children should be able to learn math at a deep level, be good at problem solving, and enjoy learning math.”

But we mistake novice learners with expert learners, Mighton said. One aspect of JUMP is to break down math into extraordinarily simple concepts, have children work diligently until they fully understand these concepts, and only then move on to more challenging problems.

Article content

We’ve already seen how well this approach can work at Fort Vermilion school district, where students on average improved two full grade levels in one year using both the new curriculum, with the teaching staff enjoying JUMP math training.

In recent years Mighton has collaborated with Prof. Brent Davis at the University of Calgary’s Werklund School, bringing together JUMP with Davis’ Math Minds program. Their approach has been used in about 60 Alberta schools and subjected to high-quality research studies with excellent results.

What’s the disconcerting part then? Given their history of proven success, Mighton and Davis should have played a significant role in helping draft the new K-6 math curriculum. That didn’t happen. It represents a blunder for Education Minister Adriana LaGrange.

Article content

Davis told me he and university colleagues have made a “fairly stinging” critique of the new math curriculum, which they say isn’t well structured and fails to help children make connections between various math concepts.

For his part, Mighton said whatever curriculum he’s presented with, JUMP does its best to create resources for teachers.

After 15 years of extensive feedback from teachers, JUMP has created comprehensive lesson plans with digital slides that should greatly assist teachers, he said.

Curriculum is one part of the issue for students, but the real issue is whether or not teachers can implement it, Mighton said, and whether or not they’re able to adopt science-based teaching technique.

This is another major rub. Davis said when Alberta teachers embraced this new teaching they got excellent results, with their students moving up five to 10 percentile points each and every year compared to other students across Canada.

Article content

But not all teachers were willing to teach the model. There are many bad teaching ideas in math, such as group work, Davis said, and some teachers are wedded to a huge focus on such failed approaches. Some see JUMP and Math Minds as too prescriptive and old school, even as their approach flows out of the latest consensus from cognitive science.

The work in Fort Vermilion is awesome, Davis said, “but whenever the province imposes something, it is often taken up resentfully, or not in the manner that is consistent its intentions. I worry that will happen with the imposition of JUMP.

In this way, the future of Alberta math education stands upon the edge of a knife.

Given the great need of our students, I hope for the best but expect widely varying results, with some teachers and school districts going all out on JUMP, but others entirely reluctant.