👨🏫 Teaching:
Colin Hegarty has recently been posting questions from Sparx and discussing which questions are better to use and why. Check out some of his tweets here. It got me thinking about the questions and examples I use in my own teaching, in particular around the numbers I choose to use. It highlights the need to carefully craft questions to pull out misconceptions and ensure students are learning the concept correctly rather than getting to the answer by chance. Unfortunately time is precious and so it is very difficult to do this for every question in every lesson I teach. Having said that, I have made a conscious effort to ensure the examples I am using are there on purpose and can be used to highlight key concepts so students can generalise ideas more easily. Will definitely look into this more as part of my NCETM course throughout the year. Definitely given me lots to think about to improve my teaching.
🔊 Listen:
High performance podcast with Mark Cavendish. Mark talks about his dark times in his career and how he came back to be successful again. It's really refreshing hearing an elite athlete talk about his own vulnerabilities and how he overcame them. Have a listen here.
📚 Read:
I have two recommendations for this week!
Firstly James Clears recent article based on the idea of Subtraction. He talks about doing less to achieve more, lots of links to the Pareto principle. Thinking about workload, this could be very beneficial. Read it here.
Second recommendation is to Peps Mccrea's thread on twitter about the benefits of routines and how they can enhance learning. I am a big fan of routines and habits because I believe it allows us to free up or working memory to be thinking about the right things. Have a read of it here.
📺 Watch:
My latest video on how I use Microsoft One note, identifying some of the key features I regularly use. This was a different style of video for me as it was fully screen recorded with a voiceover to explain it all. Watch it here.