Maths Mayhem?

By -
Teaching maths has been the largest challenge I have faced this term. I attempted to follow the problem solving approach, teaching half class mixed ability problem solving lessons 4 times a week, with one workshop. This had been an approach that we were taught through professional development last year and my school sought to continue. After struggling with this for the first seven weeks, I sent out a survey to determine what the students thought of our maths lessons. It was clear from the responses that the majority of students were unhappy. Some said that the problems were too easy, while others said that they were really struggling. I was having more behavioural problems in maths than in any other subject because of these emotional responses.

 I then tried to offer more materials to my learners who were struggling and to run a longer warm up at the start of the session to explain the concept to them. This helped them a little but they lost engagement by the end of the maths lesson. I also tried to do something similar for the high achieving students but in the end I really rushed through the lessons, conscious that this was surplus to the 'main' lesson that I was running that day. 


This was pretty amusing as I am about to start research looking at how teachers can differentiate their maths lessons in a mixed ability class. I was feeling pretty concerned, and I could even match my mistakes to those documented in the literature. However, the research inspired me to make a change, so I began to offer three workshops and got the students to opt in to at least one of them. This meant that I had enough time to cover the content at different levels of difficulty. Similarly, I  create different digital independent tasks and allow the students to choose which to use.


I run these workshops at the start of the week and ensure that they cover the concepts that the students will require to tackle the problem. I have also ensured that I have used open ended problems as much as possible, so that the students can alter the difficulty of the problem themselves. If I have to use set numbers in the problem, I will include the option to alter the numbers so that they are larger or smaller.



Comments

  1. Dorothy16 May 2017 at 21:12

    I am following this with interest Danni. I want to know if it works! Keep posting :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Different Kind of Ending

By -
Image
As I approached the stage at my graduation on Friday,  I began to consider where I might be if I had not undertaken this degree. In fact, there was a chance that I might not have gone to University at all, as I am the first person in my family to gain a degree and one of only a handful from my old primary school.  Although I like to think I would have found a job that I would enjoy, it would be such a shame to let my dream of teaching go simply because I was not brave enough to enroll in tertiary study. It felt a little surreal returning to the University of Auckland city campus on Friday to graduate. I know that at other universities graduation is held at the end of the year, yet mine was held after I had finished my first term as a teacher. Although the celebration felt a little belated,  I really enjoyed catching up with my old classmates and I had a wonderful day. The highlight of my Graduation was when I went to dinner with my family as we discussed my ti...
Read more

Unpacking Our Reading Journey

By -
Image
Over the past two years I have been able to track a target group of students in my literacy group. The students are all girls except for F and G but these boys left in 2018.  I wanted to track this group closely this year as they came to me with reading ages between 8 and 9, where our learners seem to get stuck. In the first year, some were able to achieve accelerated shift, while others only made 6 months. Student End 2017 End 2018 End 2019 A 8.5 9 11 B 8.5 10.5 12 C 9 10.5 13 D 9 9.5 11 E 9 10 11.5 F 8.5 10 / G 9 9.5 / I focussed on those that had made the best shift and surveyed them to see what they thought caused it. F said that he enjoyed the topics that we were reading and that he was reading more. B and C had similar answers, with my hunch being that B made so much shift due to reading more at home. In fact, I gave B an extra text every week. In 2019 I attempted to give the students texts that they would find more interesting, and for the end of te...
Read more

Top Tips for Online Learning

By -
Image
With the world in lockdown every teacher is having to make adaptations for online distance learning. To help speed your learning journey,  here are seven top tips that I've curated from the experts Harry Fletcher-Wood and Dr Nina Wood at the  Education Hub . 1. Students attention spans are going to be far shorter . We know that there are many distractions for children at home and they are definitely not dedicating six hours of their day for school work. We don't want to overload parents either - if there is too much content and they have multiple children things get very tricky. A couple of hours of learning a day is great. In fact, my 11 to 13 year old students tend to clock out after about 90 - so I make the most of them! 2. Your learning activities need to be simple. We don't have the chance to meet face to face with students, to answer questions as they arise, so our tasks need to be easily introduced and explained. It is helpful to use a similar format each ...
Read more