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📝 Weekly Report #10

👨‍🏫 Teaching:

I was in Birmingham Tuesday/Wednesday for part of the NCETM Secondary Mastery Specialist course. It was great seeing the rest of the cohort in person after 'virtually' meeting everyone last year. We discussed ways of adapting resources already out there, how to assess students understanding and collaborative planning. It's inspired me to start up some collaborative planning in my own department to introduce some of the concepts we have spoken about. After speaking to my Head of Department, we are going to start with Year 7 lessons. We have changed this year to focus just on Number topics in Year 7, giving more time to go into depth with the concepts, so it would be beneficial to give some extra support on how we could teach to depth. The plan is to meet up once a week to discuss the following weeks lessons. Initially I will plan the lessons myself incorporating some of the Mastery ideas I have been learning about, and then we will discuss ways of improving and tweaking the lesson. Hopefully we will build coherent, purposeful maths lessons that allow students to succeed and improve not only their procedural fluency but also their conceptual understanding.  

🔊 Listen:

The Knowledge Project podcast episode with Robert Cialdini discussing the art of persuasion. In this episode Robert reveals techniques sales men use to persuade us to buy their product and how we can get more people to say yes to our requests. One thing he spoke about in particular was not to be fooled by the 'gift' you are given by sales men or people asking you for something. That free cup of tea or free food they give you entices you to buy more from them so be very cautious when you receive those freebies! Lots more to listen to here.

🔊 Listen:

Episode 1 of Bags to Learn podcast with Dani Quinn. Really interesting hearing her take on reasoning in Mathematics and how she teaches for it in her lessons. Have a listen here. This new podcast with Ben Gordon looks like there will be some really interesting guests so I look forward to hearing more. 

📚 Read:

Another takeaway from Rebel Ideas by Mathew Syed this time about Hierarchy. Syed gives an example of an airplane crash where the engineers could see that they were going to crash but didn't have the courage to speak up over what the pilot was doing. He talks about how the leaders often have the biggest say and biggest opinion and can dominate meetings. This doesn't allow those rebel ideas to be said by those in lower paid positions. Syed calls the opinions of the people in power, hippos, highest paid persons opinion. To support rebel ideas coming out he talks about leaders speaking last or at least giving everyone an equal chance to speak and give their opinion. One idea was using something like Mentimeter to gather thoughts or using post it notes and not assigning names to the idea. Read more here.

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