Cameron Setter

👨‍🏫 Teaching : Have done a lot of thinking this week about the tasks I set students. Mark McCourt put a wonderful tweet out listing the different parts of a learning sequence for students. See tweet here . It nicely puts into words some of the ideas I was thinking about myself. I then also listened to Craig Barton's podcast with Tom Francombe and they spoke about giving students tasks that distract their attention but have them practicing the skill taught in the lesson. From this I have been writing tasks and noticing other tweets with exercises on that distract student thinking. So for the next half term one of my focus points is on creating and regularly using these distraction tasks in lesson.  🔊 Listen : Walter Isaacson on the Knowledge project discussing Creativity. He talks about how some of the most creative people of all time, Davinci etc, immersed themselves in learning as much as they could and then linking things together. So tying the art knowledge to his engineering...

👨‍🏫 Teaching: Last week of this term complete! Time for a well deserved week off, and I mean a week off! No emails, no marking, no work. When I'm away from school that is my time to recharge and enjoy spending time with my family. I will still be reading, listening to podcasts/audiobooks and watching videos to further develop my teaching but that is because I enjoy it not because I am forced to. We've had a number of staff absences this term putting a strain on our department that my HOD and myself have been dealing with. We've had classes doubled up so students are still receiving the same great teaching and fortunately our behaviour system has meant that lessons continue to be disruption free.  We finished the term with a training day wh were we were given a nice chunk of time in our departments to focus on improving what we are already doing.  Time for a week to recharge ready for next term! 🔊 Listen: Logan Aldridge: Shattering Expectations on Trained by Nike. Logan l...

👨‍🏫 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...

👨‍🏫 Teaching: I had my first observation/coaching conversation of the year with the teaching and learning lead in our leadership team this week. She came and observed a year 11 lesson on solving quadratics. For this group it was the culmination of a number of lessons expanding brackets, graphing quadratics and factorising quadratics. Coaching is a fantastic way to continually improve and I find it great to have those conversations discussing how to improve. I find it more beneficial that we can talk about my specific classes and supporting those students rather than just generic ways of improving. I look forward to my next observation to continue getting better each lesson, each day.  🔊 Listen: The Knowledge Project podcast by Shane Parrish speaking to Nir Eyal about mastering indistraction. Really interesting listen, Nir talks about how the more we get distracted the more we convince ourselves that it's ok and it becomes who we are, a distracted person. We need to stop this flo...

👨‍🏫  Teaching: It's not been the best week for me, I was off ill Tuesday and Wednesday and consequently didn't upload a video on YouTube this week. I will be back to creating content next week though. My department had a visit from our Academy Trusts new Director of Maths and she was very complimentary about the new key stage 3 curriculum I have put in place. Would be really good if this could be implemented across the rest of the Secondary schools as I feel it could make a real difference to the knowledge and understanding students have of Maths prior to taking their GCSEs.  🔊 Listen: I caught up on Craig Barton's podcast with Jo Morgan discussing depth and curriculum sequencing. Really informative listen and certainly resonates with me after changing our Key Stage 3 curriculum this year. Have a listen  here. 📚 Read: I know that I have just implemented a new key stage 3 curriculum at our school however the NCETM have just released some guidance for those of you who d...

👨‍🏫 Teaching: We had our schools open evening this week which was a fantastic opportunity to show off some of the great things we are doing in our department. Ended up speaking to lots of parents and potential future students until late in the evening. It's really noticeable how much of a difference a positive attitude towards maths from parents rubs off on their child. When parents are supportive and encourage their child to do well in maths, the child themselves is happy to have a go at activities and shows much more resilience when challenged. Hopefully this bodes well for next year's Year 7s and we have another fantastic cohort.  🔊 Listen: Have done a bit less listening this week as I have started riding my bike to work rather than driving so the podcast have taken a hit. However I have managed to re-listen to James Clears Atomic Habits on Audible. It's a great book with lots of takeaways. I regularly revisit this book and take something new away. This week's th...

👨‍🏫 Teaching: At the end of my first full week of teaching after Summer I feel like a bus has hit me! It's been great seeing all my classes again and getting stuck into some maths but it has also been a challenge. My timetable has already changed and everyday seems busy with small little tasks cropping up. I know that next week wil be smoother though because we will be back into the swing of things and there shouldn't be anything major that needs fixing. Looking ahead, I've been given a brand new laptop! So after all of my issues with the battery failing on me on the last one, I can teach worry free now. We are also beginning to plan our Open evening to showcase our department to future students so any good ideas for us to do in Maths would be appreciated.  🔊 Listen: Tim Ferris speaking to Sir James Dyson, in particular the first half. Sir James Dyson talks through his challenges before starting the Dyson company we know now and the numerous failed vacuums he made. Its f...