What is good practice in adult numeracy teaching?
Jon Swain is a researcher on various NRDC numeracy projects. Here, he outlines some early issues from the research. Is this a sensible question? It’s a question to which policy-makers demand an answer but can anyone come up with a meaningful response? ‘Good practice’ means different things to different people, but we have to start somewhere. In purely practical terms, a teacher entering a classroom for the first time to teach numeracy to a class of adults needs to be able to base their practice on something tangible, a set of guidelines if nothing else. There is a wide range of empirical experience to draw on, from people who have been teaching adult numeracy for many years (including the teacher-researchers working on NRDC numeracy projects), and there is probably more agreement about what makes ‘good practice’ than many people might think. Defining bad practice However, it is probably easier to agree on what is meant by ‘bad practice’ than ‘good practice’. For most people, bad practi
