Examining Newly Qualified Teachers’ use of Textbooks to Support a Mastery Approach to Mathematics Teaching in Primary Schools: A case-study

In this paper, we report the findings from a small-scale case study of four primary schools who have adopted mastery textbooks/schemes for their mathematics teaching. We focussed on the circumstances of Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs) who bring to their first post recently developed understanding of mathematical learning theory together with limited experience in the classroom. In joining a school undergoing what Mathematics Subject Leaders (MSLs) will hope to be transformational change in mathematics teaching practices, they face a unique situation: how to learn to take responsibility for their pupils’ mathematics learning while also learning how to manage the structure, organisation and recommendations of the mathematics textbook/scheme, and how to draw on and make sense of mathematics learning theory in so doing. While we explored changes in teacher practices and subject knowledge, our chief and unique focus was on how textbook use by NQTs has been supported in the case-study schools and how these new teachers are beginning to mediate and take responsibility for their use of textbooks to support pupil learning.