The first week back for the 2020 academic year has been busy. I am teaching more periods than last year, and am teaching P6 (Year 7) for the first time after 4 years of only teaching IGCSE or IB.
First P6 Lessons
In the very first lesson I set a puzzle from the Complete Maths Puzzle pack (I can't find the link on their site anymore). It was a great little puzzle to get the students behaving mathematically (using Mark McCourt's language) on something they had a lot of knowledge about. That being said, none of them solved the problem in either class in the 20 minutes they had on it! Many did the wrong thing first by trying to find how many 7 go into 999. But mostly they missed all the 7s that are in the tens position.
In the very first lesson I set a puzzle from the Complete Maths Puzzle pack (I can't find the link on their site anymore). It was a great little puzzle to get the students behaving mathematically (using Mark McCourt's language) on something they had a lot of knowledge about. That being said, none of them solved the problem in either class in the 20 minutes they had on it! Many did the wrong thing first by trying to find how many 7 go into 999. But mostly they missed all the 7s that are in the tens position.
We are also starting the journey towards a mastery approach, and following the cycle Mark espouses in his excellent book. We have started this by trying to use diagnostic questions to set a pre test to ascertain what level the students are currently at so we can teach from there. Unfortunately it was the first time most of them had used the laptops or computer lab, and technical issues got in the way of them completing it in class, so they are finishing it for homework. Won't be ready before we start for this unit, but a work in progress!
Departmental T&L
This year I have scheduled plenty of departmental T&L time in to the CPD programme. We have a session every week on a Wednesday for 40 minutes after school, and this year they have 10 in departments across the year
This year I have scheduled plenty of departmental T&L time in to the CPD programme. We have a session every week on a Wednesday for 40 minutes after school, and this year they have 10 in departments across the year
Geography shared a great project they are working on with me about defining the IB geographical skills and then backwards planning to introduce some more of them further down the school.
In Maths we taught 5 minute snippet lessons (as if the department were a class), and then discussed them in groups. I did a P6 (year 7) lesson on sequences, our HOD did an IGCSE class on variation/proportion and our IB Coordinator did one on introducing complex numbers. We all did things very differently.
I went for the example-problem pair that has become a standard of my teaching.
In teaching variation, our HOD made explicit the different language that students might encounter when solving these problems (a is directly proportional to b; a varies directly as b; a ∝ b), and then did a quickfire write the algebraic statement (a = kb) on the mini whiteboard for some that he called out (including using squares, roots etc). I liked that this really broke down this skill and just practiced that without any calculation going on.
To introduce complex numbers, we heard a story of how numbers developed, and the narrative was really powerful. It created a sense of wonder and background. We discussed how this might lead to lots of questions (Theory of Knowledge style) and that it was ok to derail the lesson to address these. One suggestion was to use a timeline to make this more visible (Dual Coding!?) and also highlight some international perspectives (like when did these things happen in the East compared to the West)
I will be asking all Heads of Department to share a brief document with what they did in the first 3 weeks of these sessions, so that we can feedback to the whole staff on some of the great things going on.
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