Links to Organisations
Featured Website:
Primitives visualisation of primes and multiples.
Do you have a favourite numeracy or maths site to recommend to colleagues?
Questioning Techniques
In an action packed session, Susan led us to think about how questioning can be opened up to involve everyone in a class. By using mini-white boards and questions of the type “write down two numbers with a highest common factor of 6”, every student can respond at their own level without copying the cleverest person in the class. A selection of answers are written on the board without comment until all the mini-whiteboards have been cleaned. This avoids embarrassment for those who have made useful mistakes showing common misconceptions which can then be used for everyone’s benefit.
We then looked at more substantial open activities which can be used to deepen students’ understanding. One example was: (1,4) and (4,8) are two vertices of a rhombus. What could be the co-ordinates of the other two vertices?
Overall, it was an inspirational session that left us with plenty of ideas to take back and try out in college.
Assessing in the Classroom
In the past, the method of assessing students had been done through rigorous marking of homework. So, I was curious as to what methods could be used during contact time with students that would help to assess their understanding. Susan Wall’s session, “Assessing in the Classroom”, provided me with numerous ways of achieving this goal. Most of these ways were provided by the shared experiences and ideas of the other teachers and lecturers in the group. They were many and varied. They included the use of mini white boards, encouraging students to design their own questions, using posters and changing the methods of tutor questioning. These were but a few of the suggestions made. All of the ideas presented were then used by Susan to generate more ideas and more questions as we investigated the “good” and “not so good” points to each of these methods.
The session showed me the importance and pleasure of being able to communicate with other maths teachers from other areas, schools and colleges and share good practice. It has inspired me to rethink my own methods of assessment and to develop ways to integrate these in the new academic year.
Active Learning
How do you teach circles at AS? I think once you have seen and tried Susan’s approach with a variety of well chosen equations and activities you will find your teaching transformed. By working in small groups sorting and classifying cards, simply by what we noticed or already knew, we identified a variety of features which we could then go away and investigate.
Having seen one subject tackled in this way you also become aware of the potential of this approach in many other areas and indeed we were also given the opportunity to match some more cards and use them to produce a poster. The only complaint on this session was that we were all having fun and could gladly have stayed another half an hour at least.