Skip to main content

📝 Weekly Report #3

👨‍🏫 Teaching:

At the end of my first full week of teaching after Summer I feel like a bus has hit me! It's been great seeing all my classes again and getting stuck into some maths but it has also been a challenge. My timetable has already changed and everyday seems busy with small little tasks cropping up. I know that next week wil be smoother though because we will be back into the swing of things and there shouldn't be anything major that needs fixing. Looking ahead, I've been given a brand new laptop! So after all of my issues with the battery failing on me on the last one, I can teach worry free now. We are also beginning to plan our Open evening to showcase our department to future students so any good ideas for us to do in Maths would be appreciated. 

🔊 Listen:

Tim Ferris speaking to Sir James Dyson, in particular the first half. Sir James Dyson talks through his challenges before starting the Dyson company we know now and the numerous failed vacuums he made. Its fascinating hearing his story and things he has learnt over time. You can tell even that he is incredibly passionate about what he does which is great to hear. Click here to have a listen.

📚 Read:

Have just started Mastery by Robert Greene. I have previously listened to it on audible and took a lot from it and so I felt that I needed to have the book too. This will be a longer read but I know there is lots to gain from it. I like how Greene describes the 3 phases of learning from Apprenticeship to Creative Active to Mastery. Grab your copy here

📺 Watch:

Take a look around my classroom and see what I do to promote learning in my room. Click here to watch. As a side note, I am hoping the videos are improving week on week as I learn and apply little tricks.

Labels

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Literacy in Maths

I'm a Maths teacher, I teach numbers. Why is Literacy so important for me? Well….here's why: "Literacy is fundamental for success in school and later life. Students who cannot read, write and communicate effectively are highly unlikely to access the challenging academic curriculum in secondary school and are more likely to have poor educational outcomes across all subjects." (Link 3)  Unfortunately there are a lot of Maths teachers who believe (wrongly) that literacy is a thing that the English department do. They see it as a tick box for observations. Rather than being an essential component of students being able to learn maths.  -  So what does it look like in Maths? Answer the question: Blindle 4x + 6 Are you able to do it?  This is the challenge a lot of students face in Mathematics. Subject specific vocabulary can seem really confusing to a lot of students. Understanding what a keyword is asking of students is often the hardest part of a question and can hold s...
Read more

📝 Weekly Report #33

This week I listened to a really good podcast episode from Greg McKeown called Where am I wrong? In it he talks about a really effective method to have deeper discussions on what is important.  Write down/say the 3-5 issues/priorities you think there are as well as the cost/consequence of them. Then just simply ask where am I wrong? It starts the conversation off with the other person talking and getting their points across. You can then get that shared understanding about what needs to be done and why.  It got me thinking about other areas this could be useful for e.g. dealing with conflicts, leading departments/teams, pitching a new initiative. I am going to start doing this in some of these scenarios as I think we can have more productive conversations from it.  Have a listen to the episode here .  🔊 Listen: Alan Stein Jr on the Modern Wisdom podcast discussing high performance and overcoming stress. He talks about thinking like an athlete with your work and impr...
Read more

📝 Weekly Report #9

👨‍🏫 Teaching : Have done a lot of thinking this week about the tasks I set students. Mark McCourt put a wonderful tweet out listing the different parts of a learning sequence for students. See tweet here . It nicely puts into words some of the ideas I was thinking about myself. I then also listened to Craig Barton's podcast with Tom Francombe and they spoke about giving students tasks that distract their attention but have them practicing the skill taught in the lesson. From this I have been writing tasks and noticing other tweets with exercises on that distract student thinking. So for the next half term one of my focus points is on creating and regularly using these distraction tasks in lesson.  🔊 Listen : Walter Isaacson on the Knowledge project discussing Creativity. He talks about how some of the most creative people of all time, Davinci etc, immersed themselves in learning as much as they could and then linking things together. So tying the art knowledge to his engineering...
Read more