Skip to main content

📝 Weekly Report #24

I have been utilising ratio tables more and more in my lessons at the moment and it has given me a bit of a realisation. 

If I am teaching a topic where I want to show students and additive relationship between values e.g. how adding 10% and 5% gives 15% then I will use bar modelling to show this.

If I want to show a multiplicative relationship then I will use ratio tables. E.g. 10% X 1.5 = 15%. 

Obviously there are certain scenarios where one would be more beneficial than the other. But if I strip my teaching right down to the essentials I feel that these two representations allow me to demonstrate to students most concepts they will come across in Secondary School

I am in the process of writing a series of posts in how I use ratio tables so keep an eye out for it. In the mean time, the following thread is a great start from Sam Blatherwick. 

🔊 Listen:
High performance podcast with Scotland Football Manager Steve Clarke. One quote in particular stood out for me "don't play with the fear of failure, play with the anticipation of success." Listen here

📚 Read:
The importance of rules in the classroom. Ian Leslie uses Michaela Community School and Dixons Trinity Academy to highlight how they can help disadvantaged students in particular. Read the article here

Popular posts from this blog

📝 Weekly Report #21

The trainee teacher in our department has started to teach my Year 10 group this week. It has taken me back to when I was training and the struggles that I had and the feedback my mentor would give me. One thing I didn't consider back then was how the class teacher feels who I was taking over from.  I know that as a trainee I was no where near being an amazing teacher but over time I have continually improved. So it has been a struggle for me to allow the trainee to teach my class thinking that there would be aspects that I know I could deliver much better. On the flip side of this it has been great to learn from him by watching him teach and being able to give small steps to improve for next time. The initial focus has been on general pedagogy, e.g. use of questioning, planning for misconceptions etc. It's made me reflect on my own teaching ensuring I don't just talk it, I walk the walk too! I've also enjoyed seeing the improvements he has been able to make lesson on l...

📝 Weekly Report #7

👨‍🏫 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 t...

Ratio Tables: Why you need to use them?

Only 36% of students were able to answer the question on the right. Whereas 75% of students were able to correctly answer the problem on the left. (7) Why? What's the big difference?  Students are more likely to relate values between objects (left question) than within an object (right question). (7) A similar issue comes up in the questions below. 91% getting the bottom question correct, relating 11 people to 33 people. Whereas only 51% answered the top question correctly.  Students often struggle to see all of the multiplicative links between and within values. One of the misconceptions my own students had with the right 'L' question was that the answer was 45. They had added 13cm because 8 + 13 = 21 on the base of the 'L'. "Young children tend to see multiplication additively" Dietmar Kuchemann   DfE suggests teaching multiplication as repeated addition, with arrays, in Yr2. Yr3 scaling is introduced but after that isn't mentioned again. It is as...