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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Related links Times Tables Rock Stars Strategies for learning, understanding and remembering the times tables
In my class I run a simple pupil-checking-pupil-work system. Pupil A completes work and puts hand up in shape of letter V (for ‘validate’). Specific training beforehand as to which fingers to use! Teacher, wearing Validator sign on the end…
Poetry slams, rap battles and Mock The Week all pit the sharpest minds with the sharpest tongues against other (well, two out of three do). Opponents must outdo each other through rounds of linguistic duelling, with escalating wit and dexterity.…
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We ran four parent information events to ensure that families understood the changes to their children’s maths studies as a result of Project 24. Presentation from me Here are the slides I used: Thank you to Jaime Casap who put…
[embedplusvideo height=”241″ width=”380″ standard=”http://www.youtube.com/v/AcYTz19HduU?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=AcYTz19HduU&width=380&height=241&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=¬es=” id=”ep3438″ /] Today I had the pleasure of visiting one of the reknowned Rocketship schools. They were incredibly hospitable, the pupils were working hard, and the instructors answered all my hundreds of questions. Thanks to…
[embedplusvideo height=”241″ width=”380″ standard=”http://www.youtube.com/v/5mqih8pl264?fs=1″ vars=”ytid=5mqih8pl264&width=380&height=241&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=0&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=¬es=” id=”ep7192″ /] A couple of colleagues* and I have been fortunate enough to spend the last few days in New Orleans at the Virtual Schools Symposium – yes, we have very supportive line managers! While…
With a one-to-one computer initiative, a blended learning plan in the oven* and a team of people involved from KSA, ARK and Google, the scale of things has gone from one-man-and-a-class to this-thing-needs-a-name level. I’m a big fan of word…
On the back of my Time-Shifted Teaching trial last year, we’re going ahead with a larger scale pilot of blended learning this year. I found that there were a number of barriers to time-shifted teaching, including pupils’ access to computers…
In my year 7 classes at the start of every year, it’s a sad truth that not all of them know their times tables off by heart. By not having this basic building block, problem-solving later on in maths is…
We’ve just run a school-wide competition for the best animated mini maths lessons. Pairs of pupils composed short animations (using www.xtranormal.com*) on a maths objective of their choice. The animation had to meet the following criteria: It had explain a…
One of my memories of having fun learning maths was being shown how to control a ‘turtle’ so that it traced a path of my choosing across the computer screen. Maybe because I got to be the boss of…