Western classrooms have adopted mathematics teaching techniques from Asia before. In the past, a small number of schools in the West experimented with a Singapore-style approach. It is similar to the method used in Shanghai, which is seen as having the best math teachers in China.

But experts say England is the first country to forge ahead with a bold government-backed plan to remake some classrooms in the image of the East. Under a $54 million initiative funded by the government, more than half the primary schools in England will adopt a teaching approach to math that is used in top-performing places like Shanghai and Singapore.

“I am confident that the steps we are taking now will ensure young people are properly prepared for further study and the 21st-century workplace, and that the too often heard phrase ‘can’t do maths’ is consigned to the past,” said Nick Gibb, the British schools minister who oversees primary education, when he announced the initiative last year.

The teaching method, known as the “mastery” approach, is based on the idea that all students can succeed in learning mathematics when given proper instruction. Whereas teachers in the West might describe a concept and then assign problems for students to solve individually, the mastery method is more interactive. Teachers frequently pose questions to students who are then expected to precisely explain both solutions and underlying principles in front of their classmates.

Students learn fewer concepts under this approach, which allows them to go into those concepts in greater depth. For fractions, for example, teachers might ask students to apply the underlying principle “part of a whole” in different contexts, making use of pictorial representations and other visual techniques to explore the abstract idea. Ideally, only when the entire class has demonstrated understanding or “mastery” of one concept does the teacher move to the next.