#10minwin - Speed Mathing

Following an observation of Tony Ostersen's Religion & Philosophy lesson, I saw how effective sixth form pupils are at teaching each other and was eager to try it in mechanics.

Each pupil was given an exam question and given 15 minutes to solve it and prepare to teach it.

Students then arranged themselves on either the inner or outer circle (which I prepared whilst they were working individually on their questions) like so:

After each teach they looked less and less at their notes, as their fluency developed. I saw a wonderful side to a lot of the students, giving excellent demonstrations of knowledge and explanations.

Students used a variety of pre-drawn diagrams, question annotations & whiteboards in their teaching.
I was delighted that somebody re-dubbed Speed Dating as Speed Mathing!

They also filled in space in a grid for each "teacher" and what they had learnt on that table (they could write it down even if they already knew it too).

Here's the feedback:

:-) Pros

- fun

- saw different ways to approach problems

- more familiar with topics

- understand your question in great detail

- nice change

:-( Cons (and thoughts on how I can change for the better)

- time consuming

- could learn the wrong way

- would have liked more time to prepare

Changes to be Made

=> give students questions to prepare for homework so they can take as long as they like to work through and feel confident with it

=> consider having only 5 questions in circulation rather than 10. Each pair begins to work on the problem, then one of the pair has to move round with the question. By the end there should be 5 completed questions which everyone has some knowledge of.

Sometimes a Method will Have to Do...?

You followed a cake recipe and made a wonderful dinner for present.

Did you understand how the yeast worked?

Did it matter?

Report Writing

Deadline looming for a set of sixth form reports, I had a look at other staff members to see the sorts of comments that they used - here's the bank for later referral!

Positive

• pleasure to teach
• mature work ethic
• listens carefully to explanations
• asks thoughtful clarifying questions
• participates actively in class discussion
• has found the work a real challenge, but has remained positive and sought help when needed
• promising start
• quiet, yet studious
• keen to do well
• to his/her credit

Areas for Improvement

• little chatty in class
• appears to have gaps in his/her knowledge
• just too few questions being done
• struggles to transfer knowledge to a new problem

Targets

• revisit this topic throughout the year to help secure understanding
• make sure doing work independently when asked
• hope they are up for the challenge
• visit help sessions
• practice is the key to doing well
• like to see a slightly more focussed approach
• get through enough questions to consolidate understanding fully

And as the author of Authentic Inquiry did (here), I've made a wordle...

Pleased to see "questions" and "help" rather large, but "test" is far too prominent for my liking. Something to think about for next time!

#10minwin - Challenge 100

I love 100 squares.

You can look for all sorts of patterns, impose different rules for creating numbers, look for relationships amongst rows and columns...

So I stuck a massive one up on the wall.

Each month I've given pupils a different challenge, so far being:
(i) make any number using four 4s
(ii) make any number using five 5s
(iii) give an expression for any number based on where you see n

I should now explain the second point...
I love post-it notes.

Within one week of working at my NQT school, my head of department arrived in my room with 4 packs of post-its and 2 packs of mini post-its. Word travels fast.

To start with, I offered no incentive or reward for this challenge, yet pupils took it upon themselves to sporadically ask for post-its to complete a number that they'd worked out during the lesson.

A distraction? Possibly. But I can't see self-motivation to work on a number challenge as a bad thing.

#10minwin - A Level Assessed Questions

Keeping my lower sixth pupils focused has been a challenge at time, so I introduced the expectation of an assessed question at the end of every lesson. Rather ad-hoc at first, I've now created them as worksheets which randomly select a question leading from the exercise that has been covered in the lesson...

Which can then be self-assessed before the bell, giving pupils instant feedback on whether they have achieved the learning objective for that lesson.

Spreadsheet of questions can be found here.

#10minwin - True or False Board

Probably one of the most heatedly discussed boards in my classroom: True or False?

Tackling misconceptions and insufficient explanations, pupils vote on whether they think the statement is true or false. At the end of the week the correct answer is revealed with an explanation.

My favourite moment had to be a gaggle of 1st years running to change their vote on the statement above, following a test on order of operations, as they realised they'd forgotten to divide before subtracting!

The statement bank can be found here - any more ideas greatly appreciated!

Maths and Doodles

Whilst in Whistler, I've had spare time to re-enjoy maths...

Odd One Out

I can't remember the last time I read, viewed or thought of something without automatically wondering how I could include it in a lesson.

The odd one out game we were given for Christmas was no exception, so here it is, a Maths version of Odd One Out. The aim is for it to be used with ABCD cards either as an icebreaker or 'filler' at the end of the lesson. It enables students to use their knowledge outside of the context of the lesson on a specific topic, and involves all pupils as it is self-differentiating - each pupil can look for a different level of difference between the choices. On pressing REVEAL the odd one out and its reason is given, but naturally there are often perfectly acceptable alternative reasoning that students could come up with, making it very interesting to see the different ways in which pupils are thinking.

Questions are levelled from 1 to 5 by content (5 is A Level), with the 'questions' tab giving the list from which the game draws. Some of these questions look at the 'lists' tab to randomly select an option, keeping the questions fresh.

The spreadsheet can be downloaded here.

Getting back onto Flipboard

Having recently shared my flipboard magazine with a colleague, I was back on quest to find a way of Google Readering without Google Reader. Although my Google Reader feed is still active, I can't add to it and I can't remove feeds from it.

Sure, it's easy to type an RSS feed into flipboard and subscribe to it individually, but when in Google Reader I was subscribed to most of David Wees list of maths and education blogs, plus a few additions, so it would have taken me some time to add them + given me over 40 pages of flipboard tiles.

The answer: RSS Mix
Simply paste the RSS feeds into the textbox (maximum of 100), click create and you'll be given your own rssmix URL which can be read as a single magazine in Flipboard. To do this click the search button in the top right hand corner of the Flipboard menu page, and paste the URL (I'm using http://www.rssmix.com/u/3861797/rss.xml).
If you want to add blogs to this list, you can simply RSS Mix the feed above with some of your own, then create a new feed mix. The RSS Mix feed above and any you create can be shared with others by simply giving them the feed URL, which they can import to the RSS reader of their choice.

The drawback of this is that deleting blogs from the list means going back to your original spreadsheet, then re-creating the RSS Mix, then re-importing into Flipboard, but you'd hope this wouldn't happen that often.

The solution isn't perfect, but it's a start until Flipboard allow synchronisation with a Feedly account or similar.

Great Dodecahedron

Grade and Level Descriptors

A minimal post on a collated resource on level and grade descriptors for KS3 and KS4. Columns can be filtered to see progression within a broad topic, specific topic, or grade requirements.
Download here.

Nando's Takeaway Homework

After some more rooting around for ideas about homework, I found a blog with an example of a Take Away Homework as inspired by Teacher Toolkit's book. Having a little issue with the morals of KFC I decided to change mine to Nando's (marginally better), to be displayed in the classroom as well a takeaway menu for each student to take home.

Feedback on Receipts

Using my love of spreadsheets I've created the menu on excel, and what better way to keep the theme than to give feedback in receipt form! If needing to give feedback one at a time (e.g. that wonderful moment when a student volunteers to do extra homework) then you can fill out the blue boxes and it will generate the receipt for you.

If on the other hand you have a whole class of homework to mark, there's a separate feedback form which will generate multiple receipts based on your inputs.

The advantage of providing the feedback on a receipt is that you can omit certain costs and as a second level they can calculate the missing cost. The missing costs are graded according to difficulty, allowing for differentiation (the highest level being missing tax, where the student has to calculate the tax and the percentage it was set at, allowing for rounding).

Spreadsheet generates receipts based on feedback input into above spreadsheet, You'd never guess I've been reading "Long Way Down" recently.

The spreadsheet can be downloaded here.

Hattie's Influence Scale

Creative Homework

Inspired by @headguruteacher blog on the importance of homework, I set about creating a bank of creative ideas for maths homeworks. I've had great success in the past getting students to create mini-videos and writing postcards to relatives - they really take ownership of their work and I was incredibly impressed with the final product. It even ticks the literacy box too.

Extract from @headguruteacher blog.

@headguruteacher gave some great new ideas, which I've taken, adapted and added to, to make it suitable for a maths class.

As with all more open homework tasks, it is of paramount importance to discuss what would make a "good" standard and what would make an "excellent" standard, to ensure that pupils know what it expected of them.

For each homework, I intend to decide which of the tasks would be applicable, and present these to the class. Three students will be chosen at random to select which activity they would like to do, and the rest of the class can then select from these 3. I hope by using this strategy students will be able to take ownership of their work as before, but restrict the number of times they do the same type of task, as well as avoiding receiving 9 types of homework to judge equally.

I plan for many of these to be peer assessed, with those that chose a specific task to agree on a success criteria and mark 2 other pupils' work according to it.

Here are the ideas I'm working on so far, and a link to the spreadsheet that houses them - automatically creating a table to paste into a powerpoint from the teacher's selection, as well as sorting to see which activities have been less frequently used, to improve variety and analyse which tasks are preferred and why.

Snapshot of Creative Homework Spreadsheet

• Record a 3 minute presentation for the class summarising what you learnt.
• Visit the youtube video X. Write 200 words arguing whether you could / couldn't have learnt the topic solely through this video.
• Draw a detailed pictoral representation of each of the keywords.
• Take a picture or record a video of where you would use this in your life and comment on how you would solve it.
• Describe your emotions as you progressed through today's lesson.
• Produce a piece of artwork taking this topic as a stimulus and write a 200 character tweet to explain it.
• Create a dictionary page for the keywords used in today's lesson.
• Write an imagined discussion between a student who is struggling to understand ….. and a student who is helping them.
• Design a brochure for the class to get them interested in what they will learn in the lesson.
• Write a 400 character text message to a friend in class X, telling them all the knowledge they needed to have before they started today's lesson
• Create an imaginary worksheet of questions based on today's topic, where the student makes a mistake on each one. Write the teacher's comments to help the student learn from their mistakes.
• Draw a timeline to show the sequence of events that occurred in today's lesson.
• Write a postcard to a relative explaining the concepts of…

Investigation on more or less successful activities to follow!

Keeping Up with #edchat and more #edchat and even more #edchat

There are so many incredible educational blogs out there, but scarcely the time to check them daily to see what has come up. With Flipboard you can subscribe to all of the blogs you like and there they are, on your tablet, your phone, your iPad, ready for you to read in chronological order in a generated magazine. Better still, now you can add articles that you like to your own magazine... I'm currently working on a math and teaching magazine here.


I've also found that quite often I come across an idea and don't have time to work on it immediately, but know it would be great for a future lessons. Thank you, OneNote, for allowing me to screenshot what I've spotted, jot down a couple of my thoughts and be there to be searched for when I teach the topic later.

Snapshot from OneNote

I've kept separate tabs for each category, then can quickly create tickboxes of curriculum areas that it covers, ideas for how to structure the task and leading / extension questions I think would be effective.

Hopefully some day I'll have the time to properly create the resources, but in the meantime this is a great memory jogger!