Testimonials and results

We have been privileged to have worked with hundreds of teachers across Australia. Here’s are some thoughts that they have shared with us.

Feel free to get in contact for names of principals in your local area to speak with about their implementation journey.

Leaders

Just wanting to share a recommendation for anyone looking for support in improving numeracy outcomes in their school.

Our school has been working with Tierney Kennedy for the last few years and have had some great success in building capacity in our teachers to effectively achieve the stretch for their students in numeracy. This was well worth the money and time invested.

This year is the first year we will be working without Tierney holding our hands so we are a bit nervous, but confident in our plans forward. Tierney makes you let go when she thinks you’re ready because she needs to be freed up to work with other schools who need her.

Leanne

Principal

Thank you to the team for an amazing project! And especially for keeping this going through challenging times and constant disruptions and changes!! I know how much your ongoing support and commitment was appreciated and acknowledged by teachers.

It has been extremely valuable, and I know the teachers who I work closely with have implemented many of the strategies, resources, tools, etc from each of these days.

Karly

Senior Leader

I just want to send my warmest thanks for the time you took in going through different Maths improvement approaches and strategies for our school. It has provided me with a clearer understanding and clearer direction for our school. You are doing really amazing things for education, that is having a significant and positive impact on educators and children alike.

Claudia

Deputy Principal

Teachers... just a few screen shots from emails

Organisations

Tierney is the author of the Kennedy Press, Back to Front Maths books for the years Foundation to 7. These publications are the only texts that the Mathematical Association of South Australia (MASA) has ever recommended for consideration by teachers.

Tierney is prolific, insightful and fluid in her writing in preparing invaluable support to classroom teachers. Her texts are written in such a way that teachers are able to program, plan, present and assess the Australian Curriculum. They provide teachers with explicit advice on differentiation while supporting conceptual development through problem-based learning.

In her workshops, Tierney has inspired and transformed even the most experienced teachers. She is committed to addressing misconceptions in student understanding and empowering students so that they have more control over their learning. This ensures that mathematics classrooms are able to become more dynamic, active and productive.

The Back to Front Maths website is another resource for teachers that provides extensive teaching materials, information and professional reading at no cost. Tierney’s professional development for teachers has had significant impact on South Australian teachers and their classrooms.

Mathematical Association of South Australia

As educators we are all looking for pedagogical resources that reflect the direction in the Australian Curriculum. (MAWA) believe that problem solving is very important mathematical process, so we saw Back-to-Front Maths as a natural fit to what we as group want to achieve in mathematics.

The focus in Back-to-Front Maths is to see what students actually understand, (which) is far different to telling the students what strategy to use. These resources allow students to understand, to think, see mathematics from an unfamiliar situation and justify their thinking.

The best feature of Back-to-Front Maths is the clear questioning processes that are used to find out about misconceptions as part of the natural teaching lesson. The fact that Back to Front Maths has book and website resources to support teachers in implementing this approach is an important feature. Teachers will give it a go if they have clear guides to support them.

The facilitator’s course held in Western Australia on 9 -10 June at East Maddington Primary School and supported by MAWA was a great success because teachers were given the chance to focus on the Mathematics Proficiency Strands from the Australian Curriculum. Participants from both primary and secondary schools were given the opportunity to observe an actual lesson in action and analyse exactly what students understood, what misconceptions they exhibited and what questions needed to be asked for students to expose what they thought. This process was an eye opener for the participants because the technique used by Tierney was clearly different from what takes places in many classrooms.

At the end of the facilitators training teachers were asked participants to give feedback on resources. They gave such positive feedback, we could see that others teachers within our mathematics community would also see the merits of the problem solving approach.

Our hopes for the future are to introduce teachers to a strategy that improves students understanding of mathematics which is reflected in their improved results in such things as NAPLAN.

I would like to see schools adopt the problem based pedagogy underpinning Back-to-Front Maths to support those students in our system that are at the greatest risk.

Mathematical Association of Western Australia

And here are some graphs of the results from every project we have run since 2016.