Maths journaling is giving students control over lessons

The Herald Scotland

05-06-2025

It is also one which may be doing more damage than we realise.
According to data collected through the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa), more than half of Scottish 15-year-olds worry about poor marks in maths and nearly the same amount are anxious about failing.
The overall Pisa results also showed that Scottish students' performance in maths has fallen again, down 18 points from the last time the scores were released.
The Scottish Government is in the middle of a major curriculum review, and mathematics is the first subject under the microscope.
As with most problems, however, teachers are working to solve them, and two educators in Edinburgh are laying a new path for students.
Erskine Stewart Melville Junior School teachers Holly Drummond and Dr Kirsten Fenton are working to change attitudes towards maths one classroom at a time through a teaching strategy they call 'mathematical journaling.'
It is a core tool in their teaching ethos, which focuses on play, agency, creativity, and engagement (PACE, because "you know we love an acronym in education," Dr Fenton said).
Dr Fenton said that maths journaling, at its foundation, is about helping students learn how they want to approach a topic and be creative about maths lessons.
"It's a real teacher-developed approach that Holly and I have come up with. It aims really to put the learner at its centre. It's joyful, which is what learning and teaching should be about, but it's also practical because it gives children a way of reconnecting with what learning is."
The journaling method is, in some ways, as simple as it sounds. As Mrs Drummond and Dr Fenton's students work on a mathematical principle over the course of a week, they have set times to 'stop and jot' in their journals as Mrs Drummond described.
Teachers will show some example journal entries, but the idea is to get students thinking about the lesson in their own words.
This works to dispel the myth that maths is a "secret language" that only some can understand, Mrs Drummond said.
"We wanted to move away from jotters being a space of rote practice, and to see it much more as a tool for their learning. It's a messy space, just as learning is messy.
"It is a place to collect their thoughts, it's a place that evidences their struggle, but it also evidences their progress much more. Not just by marking out of ten, or having neat calculations laid out all the time."
Many maths teachers constantly tell students to 'Show your work', but the team at ESMS believes that taking this a step further and teaching students how to show their full thought process helps them connect more with their lesson.
Dr Kirsten Fenton works on a mathematical journaling exercise with her students. (Image: Gordon Terris)
Beyond that, Mrs Drummond said that having a space to show their work to the fullest without risk of being marked down also makes it easier for students to learn from their mistakes with less anxiety.
"I think we have placed too much emphasis early on with children about getting things right, and life doesn't actually work that way.
"We thought that we needed something different. Having done quite a bit of reading and going to various conferences, we decided that what is missing a lot of the time is the talk side of maths teaching.
"We are very good at that in other areas, whereas in maths thinking and teaching we don't always allow for purposeful talk.
"We wanted to embed that and create students who are numerically literate."
Dr Fenton said that part of PACE and maths journaling is about students being brave and "exploring mistakes" in their work, while having the correct vocabulary and understanding to discuss different approaches with their classmates.
"At the start of the week, we will often take a mathematical concept and do a brain dump.
"What do you know about, say, fractions? Can you give me definitions? Can you talk me through an example? If you were teaching someone who knew nothing about the subject, how would you start?
"This is a really useful tool for us because it offers a starting point, and it gives a really early indication of any misconceptions that might not normally cause problems until later.
"Their journaling helps us with responsive teaching as well, and really getting it right for each learner, which is very important to our approach."
Read more:
The PACE approach and mathematical journaling help tackle arithmophobia by teaching students how to think about lessons in their own words.
Dr Fenton said every student likes to process information differently, and teachers always look for ways to adapt to their students.
However, maths can be intimidating for some young people because the subject feels inflexible to the uninitiated: there is always only one correct answer and one way to get there.
Students do not naturally see room for creativity or individuality, which leads to that tendency for defeatism. Frustration can lead young people to avoid the subject, which is part of another unhelpful narrative in society: the idea that maths can be escaped, sectioned off from our lives and careers.
Mrs Drummond and Dr Fenton are chipping away at this misconception, too.
Although there is much discussion about creativity, literacy, speaking, and writing, that is not to say that numbers have fled the classroom.
"There still needs to be that explicit teaching of mathematical strategies," Mrs Drummond said.
Colleagues at ESMS Junior School, Dr Kirsten Fenton and Holly Drummond, said they don't have all the answers, but they want to help teachers reimagine teaching and learning.(Image: Gordon Terris)
However, she added it is essential that children should never feel "excluded" from any subject because it does not immediately resonate with them.
"Students should not think, 'This one's not for me, it's inaccessible, it's hard.'"
She said that just as other subjects will seep into maths lessons, it is just as crucial for students to recognise when they are using maths in other disciplines.
"There needs to be a give and take between maths and other subjects. We are pulling in the literacy to make the maths more accessible, but we are also bringing maths into other areas as well."
The pair of pioneers have been taking their PACE approach on the road recently. They have been sharing their approach with the British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics (BSRLM) at multiple conferences, showcasing how mathematical journaling has helped their students feel more confident, combat their maths anxiety and build new critical thinking skills.
Feedback from other teachers and researchers has been positive. Dr Fenton said they are hoping for more collaboration as they try to do their part to give students the best foundation possible in a challenging time.
"We see this as a crunch point in Scottish education with the curriculum review, rising maths anxiety and Pisa scores. They are all warning signs, but they also provide an opportunity for us to rethink how children learn.
"Classrooms need to be places of possibility and we hope our PACE approach can be a call to arms for that.
"We're not saying that we have all the right answers, but we're working with something that is research-based, that we can apply in our classrooms and teachers can take and go and apply themselves.
"We want to encourage others to rethink what learning could and should look like."