Cameron Setter

If we created similar looking tasks for concepts, can they help students make links?  Most questions we give students look like this. 1) 37 + 18 =  2) 45 + 29 =  3) 89 + 24 =  4) 65 + 72 = 5) 34 + 23 = 6) 92 + 52 = 7) 23 + 10 = 8) 67 +29 =  9) 16 + 44 = 10) 34 + 92 = Even if we vary the questions effectively and seek to learn something about the underlying concept, some students may not realise that adding integers is the same process as collecting like terms and that it is also the same as adding decimals. Or that expanding brackets is the same process as multiplying integers or fractions. Could making the tasks we give to students similar, encourage these links?  The classic 10/20 questions given to students can potentially take time to plan/find and select for your students. Then you may need to think about ways of extending learning or offering further support to weaker students. There is lots to plan for a section of deliberate practice. Surely there m...

What can I do so that students are using all of their energy to think about the topic we are teaching? We've all been there. Taught a lesson with lots of examples, lots of discussion. You've made sure that the diagrams in your lesson complement your explanation. You don't read off the board. And yet...students still come to the next lesson having forgotten most of what you have told them. Now yes, retrieval practice plays a big part in this, but have you ever thought that maybe students had too much to think about?  Cognitive Load Theory recommends that in order to increase learning, we must reduce extraneous load and optimise intrinsic load. Long term memory and the external store (environment) have an unlimited capacity and your working memory is the bottleneck in between that has a limited amount of space to store information. We need to optimise this working memory space so that it is being used effectively in lesson by students. In the past few years there has been a b...

We are reviewing our year 7 curriculum currently and refining it in preparation for students to come to secondary school a lot weaker than in previous years because of the sheer amount of school time students have missed out on.As part of this I have looked at how we feed forward some of the representations and teaching that we advocate, linking the current topic to future ideas. Talking about why we are promoting using a method or representation and where that then goes on to in their future maths career.  Not only can this benefit students but it also shows teachers the many ways that we can make links within maths and that something that we may show when teaching place value is also relevant when we look at scales on a graph or explaining why we want to push the use of number partitioning so that when we look at multiplication it can make things easier for us to calculate. These have to be carefuly selected and incorporated though, using a particular representation/method has to...

Seneca talks about not jumping from book to book or from idea to idea constantly. Rather we should be sticking with something to embed the learning before look at something else. This applies to teaching too. We often jump from topic to topic and students only get a shallow understanding, what we need to be doing is going deeper into concepts, integrating the new knowledge into other aspects of the curriculum before moving on.  This isnt a new idea, as I mentioned, Seneca was advocating this thousand of years ago. More recently the likes of Benjamin Bloom, Thomas Guskey, Mark McCourt etc advocate mastery learning. Teaching from where students currently are and deepening their knowledge in a topic before moving to something else. Mastery has been a buzzword for a number of years but the idea of embedding knowledge is centuries old. I know that I am guilty of 'covering' a topic so students have seen it and making sure I am getting through the curriculum. The more I read though th...