It's no wonder students struggle with Trigonometry, Pythagoras, Quadratic Formula etc.
We overload them with too much new information all at once.
Instead, drip feed these topics into the time before these lessons to reduce cognitive load and give students time to learn to a greater depth.
Here's how I have done it:
Drip feeding future content is an untapped gold mine that we can exploit further in our teaching.
Why drip feed the content when we have dedicated time to teach it?
- Reduces cognitive load
- Can explore the topic to a greater depth
- Ensure students have the relevant prior knowledge to be successful
- Reduces the need for constantly reteaching
In starters in the lead up to the topic and during lessons on substitution I use the relevant formulae students will use later in their Maths journey.
My Yr 10s are about to learn about the Sine Rule and Cosine Rule, last term they were answering questions like this in the starter.
They have no previous knowledge of these formulae but they know how to substitute and could fluently answer these questions by the end of the term ready to learn all about them this term.
In a lesson on square numbers with my Year 7s I gave them these two challenges. We spoke about the process of putting numbers in being called Substitution and discussed ways of finding one of the values if we were already given two numbers.
I can then teach students how to substitute into these formulas, rearrange to find missing values, dealing with trigonometric functions, squaring, pi etc. This is done in a substitution specific part of the lesson, for the students, the formulae they use are irrelevant.
When we then get to these topics in the scheme of work, substituting into the formulae isn't the sticking point.
We spend more time looking at the 'why' and use the extra time focusing on the more important new knowledge they need to know e.g. labelling, method selection etc.
It's there anything else you can drip feed into what you teach your students before formally teaching a topic?