Following a recent test, my Year 10 class were baffled by the following problem, despite their confidence in the key skills behind it:
So we broke down the problem into individual cards.
Within each group, there were 4 roles (inspired by a recent CPD session):
- Reader:
only person whose voice can be heard
- Judge:
writes the letter on a post it and puts on scale
- Justifier:
writes reason on a post it for the judges position (no discussing!)
- Methoder:
writes maths method (e.g. standard form) on post it
The reader reads out each of the individual cards, while the judge decides how difficult the question is. During the activity it looked something like this:
So within the group they were able to see that none of the skills in the question were "too" tough for them (though they hadn't been told that it linked to the test question until they figured that out!)
Their feedback on the task:
- felt more focused to concentrate on listening to the reader really carefully
- sometimes the justifier wanted to disagree with the judge!
- reader had to make sure they were really clear as they weren't allowed to show the card to anyone else
After this, they were re-presented with the original question, and using the cue cards, they were then allowed to talk to each other to arrange the steps into an order in which they could have solved this 6 mark question.
