Beer - Guinness - Gordon's ... a pattern?

Professional Tutor's opinion of the belief in young people, from the QISA website.

A lot of today's session comes from Teacher's Toolkit, by Paul Ginnis. One lesson this week, I will use the Lesson Planning Audit against one of my lessons.

We were also pointed again to Jackie Beere's book, the Perfect Oftsed Lesson.

Learning Objectives

• 2BA2 - to be able to
• bridging between previous lesson to today and beyond
• put 'previous lesson' section on 5 mins Lesson Plan
• think about 'purpose' column in terms of impact on learning
• could put double-sided sticky tape on the back of printed learning objectives so they can be stuck in... messy?

Lesson Planning

• higher level questions: Bloom
• think about time frame for teaching this area
• laminated mobile phones, write a text to their mum? ... might be problems with recording in book
• SA extension: smart arse!

Key Terms

• glossary stuck into back of book at the start - highlight as each word is covered?
• "key word" spotter: record in a class key words book

Plenary Idea

• "I am an expert at..." "To do this you need to..."
• "I need an expert for..."
• make sure there is a space for names!

Active Lessons

Negative Numbers

Giant number line in sports hall, get them to start at different places and then give sums, gives opportunity for some pupils to walk along the number line but some to have to work it out straight away - possibly in a different area?

Multiplication

Make giant multiplication grid, students in each 'box' of grid with a whiteboard, give sums so have to work as team to get final answer as each person has a job - differentiate by putting certain students in different spaces, then progress by moving around.

Delphi Method

Wikipedia

The Delphi method (pron.: /ˈdɛlfaɪ/ del-fy) is a structured communication technique, originally developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of experts.^[1]

In the standard version, the experts answer questionnaires in two or more rounds. After each round, a facilitator provides an anonymous summary of the experts’ forecasts from the previous round as well as the reasons they provided for their judgments. Thus, experts are encouraged to revise their earlier answers in light of the replies of other members of their panel. It is believed that during this process the range of the answers will decrease and the group will converge towards the "correct" answer. Finally, the process is stopped after a pre-defined stop criterion (e.g. number of rounds, achievement of consensus, stability of results) and the mean or median scores of the final rounds determine the results.^[2]

As I am about to move onto area and perimeter, words with which many pupils seem to struggle, I thought it might be an idea to use this Delphi method as a way to elicit meaning from the pupils, highlighting misconceptions then attempting to narrow down to a definition that all pupils agree with and can understand.

Possible Implementation: in silence each student writes down their own definition, then discuss to find best definition in groups of 4 - read out to class inc. any that they discarded because they thought it wasn't correct.

Autograph Session

Pentagons, Hexagons and Airports

We were shown to use Flash Earth for a whole variety of uses!

• Reagen Airport - bearings, what do the runway numbers mean
• Hexagon on the North Western tip of Australia
• Pentagon in Washington
• Parabola in Dungeness

Jing - download here.

For more info on everything... go to Douglas Butler's Blog

screencast.com/t/RF43bazkw

word_test_jing

Mathematical Language Idea

A fab find on Mr. Collins' blog - Mathematical Concepts Wall! This idea ties in nicely with the week's focus on mathematical language.

For more info, see his blog post here.

Too Exciting Problems!

Classroom Management
This morning began with a continuation of the classroom management discussion from yesterday.

• Benchmarking: draw a line in pupils books to help them see how much work they've done in 5 minutes  - possible photocopy and send home?
• Quiet Word: avoids giving pupils the attention they may be craving with their behaviour
• Orders not Requests: removing the "can do" option makes it non-negotiable; adding "thank you" at the end compels them to follow instructions

Seating Plans

• seating plans for instruction, then can work with whoever they want providing they remain on task; bring back to seating plan if not
• study buddies: get students to decide who they work well with
• seat pupils with a friend but not in friendship groups

How Important is Proof?

Proof was the main part of our discussion today. Initially we all had varying definition of proof, so described it as:

Proof: a valid argument that logically builds on knowledge that the students already have to get to the next step.

 We then looked at a progression of problems given in a lesson aimed at motivating proof..

Motivation
The above is an example of motivation for the study of proof, in the same way that the algebraic magic triangle is motivation for the study of algebra.

Individual task motivation could also be achieved by having codes, padlocks and prizes.

The full article written by Andreas Stylianides can be found here.

Polynomial Division
On a total sidenote to the whole session, I learnt synthetic division today (RH working):

As it's very removed from what you're actually doing with polynomial division, I'd be reluctant to teach it this way, but use it myself to check pupils' answers quickly and/or teach to Year 13s if I feel they have a full understanding of the concept and therefore would just be giving them an alternative method.

Proof of Adding +ve and -ve

Blonde Hair ... tis a problem.

Language
The session began as a follow on to yesterday's EAL focus; discussing language in mathematics.

Common confusion with words came up:

• minus & negative
• trials & events
• alternative and alternate angles
• random & strage
• area & perimeter

In order to combat this, a possible idea is to use games such as Taboo (or Oobat, as pupils are encouraged rather than not allowed to use the words on the cards) and Articulate (or Mathiculate, link here.)

Definitions

So it turns out that none of us can define anything - on being asked to draw a diagram, we nearly all drew something with 4 sides and a rectangle - a very particular case! Instead, a much more open example such as:

We were encouraged to focus on the meaning of words rather than their definitions; especially in considering the context in which the word was used.

One possible ideas was to split the class in half, having them each working on different things, e.g.

• multipling and adding fractions
• adding and multipling negative numbers
• intercept and gradient
• a squared and 2a

A Level Teaching

Nick's session on A level teaching followed, with a match-up activity of graphs, their derivatives and stationary points.

We then created our own activity for a topic we may be teaching.

Our activity was on momentum and is most definitely a work in progress...

The first steps involve matching the worded problem with initial and final diagrams:

then sorting these sets into one of the boxes in the table below:

Conservation of energy and momentum are both considerations here!

Problem Solving

Gabriel's session began with a blonde problem (I really did feel blonde after failing to answer it!)

A discussion followed on the importance of giving us time to first read and think about the question, before group discussion was allowed. We were also given a task to step out of problem solving to write down what we felt about the task, and again at the end - a great way to consider emotions with problem solving.

Resources Extra Session

Here are the links to (hopefully) everything you may need to access during this evening's session.

TES
To see resources that each other have made, search for the person and use People as the drop down box, the click Follow.

Wordle
Words are scaled according to prominence in the text, blogs etc.
Useful to do at the beginning of a chapter and get pupils to highlight in yellow when they hear a word for the first time and highlight green when they feel comfortable with that word.

Aine's Website List of Resources

No Hands App

A helpful app created by a teacher which allows you to enter your classes, your timetable and your students name and overlay this random name generator on top of your powerpoint presentation.

Sharp Calculator Emulator

Downloadable emulator for sharp calculators - requires ZIP unpacker.


MJMT's Resources

´        New Zealand maths, nzmaths [http://nzmaths.co.nz/]

´        Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching, mepcimt [http://www.cimt.plymouth.ac.uk/projects/mep/default.htm]

´        Mr Barton Maths [http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/]

´        Waldo maths [http://www.waldomaths.com/]. Equation solver is recommended.

´        Shodor [http://www.shodor.org/interactivate/activities/]

´        Risps [http://www.risps.co.uk/]

´        Wisweb [http://www.fi.uu.nl/wisweb/applets/mainframe_en.html]

Bimbles, Gloops and Flobs

Today's OUDE session was spent at Oxford Spires Academy, which has a high EAL population and hence was our focus for the day. The day consisted of a mixture of observations, EAL discussions sessions and a debrief with Anne.

Nonsense Questions
By far one of the most useful parts of the day for me was the idea of nonsense questions. In simplest form, all non-essential mathematical language is replaced with random words, such as:

A question like this puts native speakers and EAL students on a level playing field, where no-one knows what bimbles, gloops or flobs are, but should be able to do the mathematical calculations required to answer the question.

A further extension to this might be to give them the original question and then highlight the words that were unimportant to the understanding of the question.

Fractions
We were advised to use the Oxford Primary Maths Dictionary for EAL students, as it has useful pictures and descriptions of mathematical key words, e.g.

Fractions: the bottom part (denominator) tells you the number of equal parts. The top part (numerator) tells you the number of those part you are dealing with.

However, this definition made no logical sense when considering 8 over 5 for example, or when doing algebraic fractions. Instead, the division definition might be more appropriate:

On a slight slide note, one of the teachers at the school found a memorable way to introduce top heavy fractions, with a little help from Katie Price...

Jordan Fractions: memorable top heavy fractions

Interesting Teaching...
Although not directly related to EAL, I saw a few examples of interesting teaching today as well.

Speed, Distance Time Graphs
Rather than asking the pupils to answer a list of question on SDT graphs, the teacher instead presented them with graphs and asked the pupils to tell their story.
I give the following as a pupil example:

"I was on my way to Nottingham to see my friend Georgia. It took me 3 hours to get there and my speed was 60mph. I then arrived and spent 1 hour having a poo. Then I took Georgia's dog for a walk at a speed of 5mph. My average speed for the whole day was 38mph."

Units and Measure
In preparation for lessons on unit and measure, pupils were asked to answer the following questions:

• How much coca-cola is in a can?
• How far is it from Oxford to London?
• How tall are you?
• How long is your fingernail?
• How much do you weight?