October 27, 2026
You ask your students a question. Encouragingly, a few hands go up and several confident answers follow. But how do you know what the rest of the class understands and if they are ready for the next step?
Research from the University of Nottingham’s Observatory for Mathematical Education found that 31% of Year 8 students with lower prior attainment reported that they did not fully understand topics before their class moved on. Furthermore, Ofsted’s 2023 mathematics subject report found that, in just under half of the schools visited, teachers prioritised covering the curriculum over ensuring that students had securely learned the underpinning knowledge before new learning was introduced. Ofsted warned that this can create widening gaps in students’ understanding.
This is where Nearpod and White Rose come together to combine trusted maths pedagogy with interactive technology, giving you more opportunities to understand and respond to learning as it happens.
Of course, a maths lesson, or any subject lesson, doesn’t become more effective simply because of technology, and interactivity alone isn’t the goal. What matters is how this technology is used and what it enables you and your students to do. When thoughtfully integrated into a White Rose Maths lesson, Nearpod can help increase participation, make students’ thinking more visible and give you useful, instant insights about students’ understanding to decide what happens next.
So, what does that look like in practice? Let’s explore how Nearpod can enhance a White Rose Maths lesson in five different ways.
5 ways Nearpod can support you throughout a White Rose Maths lesson
1. See what students already know
Before moving on to new learning, it helps to know what students are bringing with them. Can they recall the knowledge they’ll need? Are there gaps or misconceptions worth addressing first?
White Rose Maths lessons typically begin with the Get Ready section, where you can check and activate prior knowledge. With Nearpod, you can make this part of the lesson interactive, using activities such as Multiple Choice, Matching Pairs orTime to Climb to involve more students and get a clearer picture of their starting points.
As a teacher, you might be looking for different kinds of information about your students’ learning. You may want to know whether they can connect a mathematical representation to the right language, recall a concept from a previous lesson or whether a common misconception is beginning to emerge. Different Nearpod activities can help you explore different questions. Matching Pairs, for example, could help students reconnect representations with mathematical language, while Multiple Choice questions could give you an indication of the answers students are gravitating towards and where further explanation might be useful.
In this way, these short opportunities to retrieve previous learning both get your class thinking about what they already know and give you useful information before you take the next step in your lesson. The best part is that what you want to find out determines the interaction you choose. So, rather than starting with “Which Nearpod activity should I use?”, you can start with a different question: “What do I need to know about my students’ understanding before we move on?”
2. Make mathematical modelling more interactive
There are moments in a maths lesson when you need to take the lead and show students how an expert approaches a problem. Effective modelling can make the thinking behind the maths explicit, as you talk through a strategy step by step, draw on prior learning or demonstrate why you might change your approach. This kind of explicit modelling can also help students develop the strategies they need to tackle mathematical problems more independently, an approach highlighted in the Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance on modelling mathematical thinking.
White Rose Maths x Nearpod lessons retain this important teacher-led input through an I do, you do approach: you model the mathematics first, before supporting learners to have a go themselves.
Nearpod can bring students into that process without taking away from the modelling itself. With Interactive Video, for example, you can create moments for them to pause and think about the mathematics they have just seen. You might ask them to predict the next step, interpret a representation, choose an appropriate method or explain why an approach works.
In other words, students don’t have to simply watch the modelling unfold. At carefully chosen moments, they can stop, think and apply what they are seeing before the lesson continues, making interaction purposeful where it can encourage students to think more deeply about the mathematics being modelled.
3. Increase student participation in Maths
Now let’s think about the typical whole class question we saw at the start. A few hands might go up, you hear some thoughtful answers and the lesson moves on. But while some students are keen to put their hands up, others may be less likely to join in. How can you create opportunities for more of the class to participate?
With Nearpod, you can create more opportunities for students to take part in your White Rose Maths lesson. Interactive polls, quizzes and collaborative boards, for example, give students different ways to contribute with 90% of educators agreeing that Nearpod improves student engagement according to our 2023 survey.
Of course, participation is about more than pressing a button or submitting an answer. What students are being asked to do matters just as much. They could apply something they have just learnt, explain their reasoning, choose between different approaches, or contribute an idea that becomes the starting point for a wider class discussion.
Creating different ways to participate can also mean considering the barriers that might make it harder for some students to take part. Nearpod’s accessibility features, like Immersive Reader, can provide additional support for students to access lesson content and participate alongside their classmates.
While you are opening participation beyond the students who might usually put their hands up, Nearpod also allows you to create opportunities for the class to engage with one another’s mathematical ideas, which brings us to the next point.
4. Make student mathematical thinking visible
Thinking again about that whole class question, hearing from a few students can give you useful information about their understanding, but what about the rest of the class? And even when an answer is correct or incorrect, there can be value in understanding the thinking behind it.
This is where the responses you gather through Nearpod can become particularly useful. The Teacher View feature gives you access to student responses during the lesson, so instead of relying only on the students who volunteer an answer, you have more evidence from across the class to draw on.
Depending on the question or activity, those responses can help you explore different aspects of students’ mathematical thinking. You might look at the approaches they have chosen, how they have interpreted a representation or whether a particular misconception is beginning to emerge.
And this is where those responses can become more than something for you to review. You can share selected examples anonymously with the class and turn them into opportunities for mathematical discussion. You might compare two approaches, explore why a particular representation works or look together at where a piece of reasoning has gone off track.
The question then moves beyond “Who got it right?” to “How did we get there?” and “What can we learn from the different ways we approached it?”, making more of your students’ mathematical thinking available to you and the class, and your lesson more student-centred as well.
Making that thinking visible also creates more opportunities for assessment of learning throughout the lesson. Nearpod gives you instant insight into how students are responding, so you can check understanding while the learning is still taking place, rather than waiting until independent work or the end of the lesson. You might see that a concept is secure, spot some uncertainty or identify a misconception that needs further attention.
5. Use student insights to adapt your maths teaching
So, you’ve got a clearer picture of what your students understand. What happens next?
This is where you can put those insights to work. White Rose Maths takes students through learning in small steps, with an emphasis on building secure understanding before moving forward. Nearpod can help you see how students are getting on along the way, giving you the information you need to adapt your teaching when needed.
Perhaps the responses show that your students are confident with the concept and ready to move on to independent White Rose practice. If there’s still some uncertainty, you might decide to pause and model another example, revisit a step or provide a little more guidance before continuing. And if you spot a misconception, you can address it while the learning is still taking place, rather than discovering it once the lesson has moved on.
That’s where adaptive teaching really comes into play. You’re not changing what students are working towards. Instead, you’re using what they show you to decide what they need from you to get there.
In this way, White Rose Maths provides the progression through the learning, while Nearpod helps you make informed decisions about how best to move your students through it.
Bringing White Rose Maths and Nearpod together
Ultimately, getting more from technology isn’t about making every part of a lesson digital. It’s about using it where it can make a meaningful difference to teaching and learning, as White Rose concludes in their piece sharing their perspective on using Nearpod to strengthen a White Rose lesson.
By bringing Nearpod’s interactive tools together with White Rose Maths’ trusted approach, you give technology and interaction a clear mathematical purpose: helping more students participate and access learning, making their thinking visible and giving teachers useful information with which to decide what happens next.