Cameron Setter

I recently read the study by Askew et el (1997) called Effective teachers of numeracy in primary schools: teachers beliefs practices and pupils learning and it introduced me to a term called connectionist teaching. Connectionist teachers have "beliefs based around both valuing pupils methods and teaching strategies with an emphasis on establishing connections within mathematics." The study compared this style of teaching with discovery teaching and transmission teaching. It found that teachers with a strong connectionist orientation are more likely to have classes that made greater gains than those classes of teachers with strong discovery or transmission orientations.  So what do connectionist teachers do? According to the study, connectionist teachers lessons are generally characterised by a high degree of focused discussion. These discussions were carefully monitored to bring out key strategies and ideas on the concept being taught. Pupils were expected to be able to expla...

Back in March 2020 when we first went into lockdown my remote teaching was very very different to what it is now. I was very green to using Microsoft teams and was unsure about muting students, adding students to meetings, sharing screens and powerpoints etc. Fast forward two lockdowns later and further experience having bubbles isolated for 2 weeks between lockdowns, I'd like to think I've got a lot better from those initial lessons. I want to highlight my progress during this year because even though my teaching is gone from being in the classroom to being online I am still looking to improve my practice. High performance is the constant pursuit of improvement. So, let me take you back to March 2020 when we first went into lockdown. I was teaching using, primarily, a visualiser. I would print off my lesson powerpoint, model and explain the lesson and show the questions I wanted students to do under the visualiser. Now at first view you may think that's not too bad, actual...