Skip to main content

📝 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.
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

England v Wales: Who teaches Maths better?

England V Wales: Who teaches Maths better? Times are changing in Wales, there is a new Curriculum focus and in Maths there are 5 proficiencies that the government want to see. Here's my take as a new HOD crossing the border from England. The Welsh government have overhauled the curriculum and not just in Maths. They have identified key statements of what matters and laid out principles for progressing in each subject.  Maths in every country is the same though surely.... Well yes... we still focus on Number, Algebra, Geometry and Statistics. But also no....in Wales it is mandatory to use their 5 proficiencies to progress students in Maths. This isn't an explicit thing in England. The 5 proficiencies are: conceptual understanding, fluency, logical thinking, strategic competence and communication with symbols Lots of big words. But if you dive deeper into the detail that the Welsh government provides on each of them it is no different to what the NCETM in England recommend with t...
Read more