Reflective Blog
This week I decided my blog post would be about me looking back at something that happened in me during my first or second week working with JUMP Math. Ewart was kind enough to introduce me to John Mighton, JUMP’s founder. I arranged a Skype call with John and discussed with him some of the reasons he had for starting up the social enterprise in the first place. He told me that he originally started JUMP as a tutoring programme and noticed that children on the programme began to improve in maths in leaps and bounds. He described how children who had difficulty counting by twos became able to compete with peers in maths in under a year. He offered a similar programme to the one used for tutoring to class teachers to improve the maths skills of all their students, and JUMP grew from there.
I found it interesting how in the early days – when JUMP was just a tutoring programme – all the tutors were friends of John who had no professional maths skills. As a result, John had to set out the maths concepts in simple, easy to understand steps so that the tutors learned the concepts before teaching students. I have been looking at research for JUMP on how students struggle to learn unless teachers are confident in the subject. When John made the guide for teachers he kept a similar layout. John mentioned that many elementary school teachers were less likely to be confident in teaching maths than other subjects. I asked John if he knew some of the research around this topic but he said that, at the time, he didn’t know that but he just included everything he’d learned in the school programme.
I found it quite hard to understand why, if JUMP is an evidence-based programme, why it would be so hard to attract school boards. I asked John about this and he said that it was because his book, the myth of ability, had “condemned” some teaching practices and resources, JUMP was unwelcome in a lot of schools. In fact, John said that JUMP was actually forbidden from attending some teaching conferences because the organisers disagreed with JUMP. I was shocked that some people, WHO CONTROL THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN, would not use a programme that was proven to work because they are annoyed at the founder.
My conversation with John was a real eye opener into the way social enterprise start-up worked and the possible dangers of starting a social enterprise that radically differed from the norm in a particular industry. I really enjoyed my conversation with John and I would really like to have another discussion with him. I guess we’ll see what happens.
