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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
“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 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.…
Asked by @MsFindlater for some advice on getting going with flipped learning, I spontaneously came up with 10 things to check before taking the plunge. Check that… All or nearly all pupils have internet at home (or you’ve thought of…
[embedplusvideo height=”224″ width=”350″ standard=”http://www.youtube.com/v/dU1xS07N-FA?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=dU1xS07N-FA&width=350&height=224&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=¬es=” id=”ep3894″ /] The short version of this short film has more than 10m views on YouTube Forget English, French and Spanish. Forget Arabic and Chinese. The language our pupils really need to know is computer…
Wouldn’t it be great if everyone in the class could recall a multiplication fact up to 12 × 12 in less than 3 seconds? That’s my goal and I’ve nearly accomplished it for the third year in a row. It…
Let’s get this out of the way up front. I’m brand agnostic. I use Microsoft, Apple and Google products every day. I enjoy using their hardware and their software for professional and for personal purposes. This is not an Apple…
This was filmed for AQA’s Better Maths website. If you’re wondering whether I could have spoken more slowly, the answer is yes.
At KSA, we teach maths in mixed ability groups all the way through Keystage 3 (ages 11-14) and I now think it’s one of the smartest decisions we ever made. When I was appointed Head of Maths, before the school…
My name is Sam and I am part of the King Solomon Academy Maths department. Bruno has asked us to write on his blog about an area of personal development in maths teaching. As part of the team I get…
Well, there’s an email I didn’t think I’d ever receive. Who could it be and why were they here to see me and not the headteacher? It can be strange what goes through my head. “I’m too young to meet…
I was in a training session today that gave me such a revelation. One of those I-see-the-world-in-a-different-way-now moments – that’s how much it rocked my world. The trainer, Carly Biggam from ARK, set us up in groups of three: one…
A while back I wrote about using LOGO as entry route for pupils into programming. I guess many of you have been thinking of ways of doing the same. One very clever teacher based in Canada, has taken some Google…