Tonight I spoke at a SHINE Trust event at the House of Lords. I talked about the transition from primary to secondary and how there are great teachers who have great, scalable ideas on how to meet the needs of…
Email just in from a teacher: “How you are tackling problem solving? Our learners and staff are finding it a challenge and I feel the key is to ensure it is right lower down in the school so that pupils…
I made this video for Rising Academy Network teachers to show them how I teach my classes to roll numbers.
In my first lesson with a new class I have two things I want to achieve: visioneering and routineering. This post is about visioneering, the act of sharing the Big Vision with your students and imbuing them with a Sense…
I’ve come to the conclusion that ace teachers are experts in classroom culture and that the most effective maths teachers are also excellent at modelling and questioning. With the hope of getting some feedback in the comments, here’s what I…
My interest in Shanghai maths teaching is an intellectual matter not a political one. We should definitely be wanting to know more about their pedagogy given we are rarely in a position in our busy, chaotic, highly emotional school lives…
It was a pleasure to host the #OfstedMaths twitter chat the other night. Thank you to everyone who submitted a question beforehand, who contributed on the night and to @harfordsean and @janejoneshmi. If you come away with one thing it…
This is the chance to ask two prominent Ofsted inspectors for answers to our questions on maths as it relates to inspections. Send your questions in advance and/or vote for questions that others are already posing, by clicking here: http://tinyurl.com/OfstedMaths…
Here’s a copy & paste of the maths section from the Ofsted Inspection Handbook: (School inspection handbook January 2015, No. 120101, page 19, para 55.) Inspecting the teaching of mathematics 55. When evaluating the effectiveness of a school’s work in…
This comment was left on the Design your own mastery curriculum article and deserves its own post. Centering on the what of early mathematical schooling, Helen talks about the emergency, reactive shortcuts that end up being used as a result…
If you work in a school where the senior management are reluctant to adopt a mastery curriculum and all the things that go with it (teaching style, intervention structure, assessment systems, etc.) then point them here! I had the opportunity…
This post is dedicated to the wonderful City Year volunteers who tirelessly dedicated themselves to the pupils of King Solomon Academy, four days a week for a whole year. In response to tonight’s #mathscpdchat, I’ve written down my thoughts on…
****************** SOLD OUT 4th/March/15 ************************** We’ll run another CPD day soon. Thanks to those who booked their places. We can’t wait to meet you! *************************************************************** Good news! I am organising another CPD event at King Solomon Academy for Maths Heads…
Long before the Education Endowment Foundation’s Toolkit found that peer tutoring can add 6 more months of learning progress, I faced a problem that only peer tutoring could solve. All keystage 3 classes at King Solomon Academy are taught in…
Spoiler: I left my heart at KSA. Background The journey started about 7 years ago, when a group of ex-Teach First teachers including me and Max Haimendorf (now KSA Secondary’s Headteacher), began some coffee-shop thinking about the endemic issue of…
Pre-reading: Strategies for learning, remembering and understanding the times tables. Some additional thoughts for starting out teaching the times tables with year 2s onwards, prompted by a #MathsCPDChat These are the things I think are important for mastery of the…
Thanks all for ranking the 9 MathsCounts logos. Results! First choice (Score 2.9*) Comments: Clean and stands out. Clear, bold, good strapline. Colour ok, font clear and tidy, strapline better, ruler nice but somewhat stereotypical, overall reasonable. Great positive message!…
Thanks for voting on the name of the “I was never any good at maths” campaign. Voting is now closed and the top 5 were: #CountMeIn 54 votes × mean score 4 stars = 216 points #CanDoMaths 62 votes ×…
Thanks to all those who responded to my call for a hashtag for the “I was never good at maths” campaign. More than 50 responses came in and the best are shared below. Now I need you to rate each…
Spoiler alert: assistance required. For as long as I’ve been a maths teacher, and probably before, it’s seemed to me a travesty that people would leave school saying they weren’t good at maths. Well I’ve decided to do something about…
So that I have this for the future, I’ve copied the text verbatim from Ofsted inspections – clarification for schools (October 2014, No. 140169). Ofsted inspections – clarification for schools The purpose of this document is to confirm facts about…
Update: the 2014 GCSE results have put us in the top 10 in the country for 5 A*-C inc EM. Excerpt of an article written by Max Haimendorf, the headteacher with whom I and a small group of teachers founded…
Notoriously difficult for pupils to understand, I think addition and subtraction of negatives is one of the things that one comes to understand after doing lots of practice. HOWEVER, that practice needs to be yielding correct answers from the off.…
Good luck Just wanting to wish pupils sitting their GCSE maths exams in the next couple of weeks, the best of luck. I remember what it feels like to be revising hard at this stage and the exam nerves on…
There seems to be a current surge from Heads of Maths and KS3 Maths Coordinators looking to adopt more of a mastery approach to teaching maths. This post is a quick run through of the journey the curriculum at King…
11:33 TES Team: Hello and welcome to TES Maths Week. We’ll be joined from 7pm by DfE minister Liz Truss, who’ll be answering your questions on maths in the new primary and secondary curriculum. You can ask questions live later…
Here are my slides from BETT 2014. The general ideas are that: There is a brick wall of technology that gets in the way of learning.Many laptops or desktop computers used in schools are unreliable, the workflow for sharing and…
Dear Head of Maths, You are invited to spend a day visiting King Solomon Academy on Friday 21st March, when you will have the chance to observe maths lessons and daily life, discuss the department-level things on your mind and…
Plan 50 is the name I’m giving to a drive for each of my year 11 pupils to gain an additional 50 marks in their final mock exam in March compared to one they’ve just done in November. The list…
Towards the end of last school year (2012-13), the great members of the KSA maths department did an analysis of the topics coming up in the first 50 marks in GCSE maths higher papers. We looked through a stack of…
I handed out a mail-merged letter to my year 11 class today, based on their performance in a maths mock exam we held a week ago. This is how it read: Monday 2nd December, Dear R………., In the maths mock…
Dear Head of Maths, You are invited to visit King Solomon Academy on Friday 13th December. The agenda is as follows: 7.45am – Arrive 8am – Auction 8.40am – Briefing from Bruno 8.50am – Lesson observations – A mix of…
“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music.” – Bertrand Russell Spoiler alert: This video was made by two amazing artists, Yann Pineill and…
The Department of Education has published the National Curriculum in England for Maths for KS1 & KS2 and for KS3. Keystages 1 and 2 National Curriculum in England for Maths Keystage 3 National Curriculum in England for Maths Related Posts…
From Independent Chair’s report on the review of current GCE ‘specification content’ within subject criteria, published 6th September 2013. Do aims and objectives [of A level mathematics] need to change? If so, what change is needed? Only minor changes are…
The following is an extract of the text I wrote for an ebook aimed as a guide for first year TeachFirst maths teachers. The excerpt covers what I see as the major difficulty of grasping fractions – their multiple personalities.…
Background The Head of PE (Nic Christo) asked me if we could do some cross-curricular work in maths lessons that linked to the upcoming sports day. To keep the buzz of sports day going, Nic wanted English, Maths and Science…
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