FAQ's

Yes, we understand that not all schools have a credit card. Please email ange@numeracyteachersacademy and we can generate an invoice where you can pay via Electronic funds transfer (BSB, Account Number) or PayPal.

The NFP is designed to take no more than 15 minutes including set up, generating numbers, practice, independent checking, goal setting and pack up. The 'practice' phase of the session is a total of 5 minutes.

The NFP is based around the major Number skills required to successfully engage in the Australian National Curriculum Version 9.0. However, the key skills that are focused on are common to most curriculums across the world.

All NFP resources are for individual school use and are protected under copyright laws. To ensure fidelity to the program, resources are not to be shared or used in schools that have not purchased the full program.

Once you sign up your school will have access to the Number Fluency Program portal and termly meet-ups with Dr Ange on an ongoing basis.

The NFP is designed to be suitable for Tier 1 (whole class), Tier 1.5 (class wide intervention), Tier 2 (small group) and Tier 3 (individual) settings. The NFP is designed to align practice in all tiers.

There are three packages available within the NFP.

All packages include ongoing, school-wide access to the NFP online portal, which includes 'how to' videos and practical guides to support you to successfully set up and run the NFP at your school.

The 'On the Ground' package provides you with individual support from an experienced NTA consultant who is running the NFP at their school. This includes 2X 45 minute zoom sessions within the first year of you purchasing the program.  

The 'Strategic Implementation' package provides you 2 x 45 minute zoom sessions with a NTA consultant, and a full day PD with Dr Ange Rogers (program developer) within the first year of you purchasing the program.

All 3 packages allow you to attend (or watch later on replay) termly group online 'meet ups' sessions with Dr Ange Rogers where you can ask any questions related to the NFP at your school.

You can upgrade from the DIY to either the 'On the ground' or 'Strategic Implementation' package at any time by simply paying the difference.

The NFP is a targeted program where individual students work at their own pace to master a set of pre-determined skills. Teachers are required to regularly assess individual students on each skill and ensure they are fluent in the skill before they move on. While the NFP is based around the idea of Retrieval Practice, and providing opportunities for students to move critical skills into their long-term memory (as are Daily Reviews), the NFP has a very specific and nuanced focus on individual skill mastery and assessment.

Each school has its own structure and context. Some schools have 500 students on each campus, some have 5! Please reach out via email to [email protected] to discuss your school's context.

The NFP is currently a paper-based to ensure all schools have access. Works are underway to provide schools with digital options, however, I also believe that students are having less and less opportunities work and respond 'off-line', so it was a conscious decision to begin with the paper version.

The NFP is all about fluency practice. Each student completes a screener to determine the skills they understand (accuracy). They then work on their fluency with these skills through each NFP session.

Teaching students to acquire the NFP skills should take place in both whole class and targeted teaching sessions within your regular Numeracy block.

The Instructional Hierarchy was proposed in research by Haring, Lovitt, Eaton, & Hansen, 1978. They explained that skill mastery progresses through four stages of learning. These are: Aquisition, Fluency, Generalisation and Adaptation.

This research has had a profound effect on the design of the Number Fluency Program. 

In the Aquisition stage students are learning a new skill. At this stage our instruction is based around attempting to scaffold students to develop their conceptual understanding of the skill. During this stage explicit instruction, using models, strategies, prompts and cues and corrective feedback are necessary teaching approaches. We are working on developing a student’s accuracy in the skill. 

When we reach the point where students are 90+% accurate with the skill (Burns, 2004), they are ready for fluency building instruction.

At the Fluency stage, the pedagogical approaches we use are different to those we used in Aquisition stage. In the Fluency stage students require repeated practice and can be much more independent, monitoring their own performance. The goal of this instruction is to increase the ease with which the student can accurately respond. In this stage the element of time is important as this allows us to measure that the student is improving their fluency.

Once students are fluent they can then move into the Generalisation and Adaptation stages. It is here that the instruction focuses on maintaining and applying the now fluent skill in novel situations.

The Number Fluency Program Screeners assess to determine if students have acquired each skill in a set (i.e., are they accurate?). If they are accurate, we know they are ready to develop their fluency within the NFP sessions.

The NFP has been trialled from F-6 in 11 unique settings. These include: Rural, low-income, high-income, high EAL/D, multi-age, specialist school, Catholic, Independent, Government, Home-Schooling and a school in Canada.

While each school has slightly adapted the program to their context, the NFP provides a model and structure that has been successfully replicated across a variety of educational settings.

If we use the Instructional Hierarchy (Haring, Lovitt, Eaton and Hansen, 1978) to guide our pedagogical decisions we can identify when students are developmentally ready for fluency practice. 

There is a difference between being accurate and being fluent. The difference lies in the ease and speed with which the student responds. 

Once a child is accurate in a skill, it is then that they are ready to work on becoming more efficient in their recall.

Using a timed element for students who are working in the Acquisition (accuracy) phase of learning is NOT appropriate and will likely lead to feelings of stress and anxiety.

In contrast, once students are deemed accurate in a skill it is pedagogically appropriate (and necessary) to work on the efficiency of their recall.

All NFP assessments are individual and low-stakes (no public comparison occurs). This is clearly explained to teachers and students within the NFP implementation videos and guide.

No schools in the trial period have reported issues with students feeling anxious during the NFP. In fact the exact opposite. Students have reported feeling successful and motivated to develop their fluency skills.

Students in the NFP are deemed fluent in a skill when they can respond in writing (if writing is  not an inhibitory factor) within at least 3 seconds. 

The Number Fluency Program is designed to create strong home-school links in mathematics. Parents are kept informed and invited to provide their children with an extra opportunity to practice the skill their child is working on at school. This is an optional part of the program, and should be implemented once the classroom program is running successfully. This is NOT intended to be a worksheet students complete at home. For most skills it is a simple verbal prompt for parents to ask their child as they go about their daily chores. For example 'What is double 4?". It is meant to be a 2-5 minute conversation. We send home a book to work of fluency in reading, this opportunity for practice is designed to be the equivalent in Number.

Quite simply, it is very difficult to display flexibility in mathematics without a strong foundation in basic skills.

Amongst researchers there are a variety of definitions and understandings related to the term ‘fluency’. This often leads to confusion for teachers and schools. The definition used through the Number Fluency Program is: being able to answer number-based problems with ease and speed. It is important to note that this is only one aspect of what Kilpatrick et al (2001) describe as Procedural Fluency.

In Mathematics Education it is generally accepted that Procedural Fluency is the 'gold standard' in fluency. Procedural fluency encompasses efficiency, flexibility and accuracy (Kilpatrick et al., 2001) with mathematical procedures. Accuracy relates to being correct or incorrect. Efficiency is related to time, or rate of response and flexibility is identifying the most appropriate strategy or approach to when solving a novel problem. In order to achieve Procedural Fluency it is critical we provide students opportunities to develop automaticity in basic foundational skills. 

Automaticity is the ability to carry out procedures without conscious thought (Kilpatrick et al., 2001). The more automatic a task is, the less working memory is required. This leaves room for more complex thoughts and allows for the flexible application of skills.

The aim of The Number Fluency Program is to provide conditions that will allow all students to respond with ease and speed in critical areas of Number so they can come to flexibly apply those skills in novel situations.