My Intervention

 Towards the end of term 2 I had a rude awakening: I had a term left of my inquiry before starting maternity leave!!

Due to this, I needed to fast track my intervention. It was really tempting to fall back on my 2017 dissertation, in which I had a hugely successful intervention in maths that really changed my practice for the better.

As I critiqued my current practice, I could feel myself falling back on this. It was hard not to examine myself through a narrow lens; what am I not doing now that has worked well in the past?

Obviously it is important to use past inquiries - 'don't throw the baby out with the bath water'. But simply going back to an old intervention felt like a cop out. I had to at least build on it and adapt it. As I identified a weakness in my practice for teaching early maths knowledge and strategies, I decided to try something different. I investigated the style of teaching - the teaching process in our new entrants hub.

Key Learnings

- When the maths itself is simple and short (e.g. learning to count to 20), the activities suit being short and simple too. However, you do a wider variety of multi modal activities so the learning sticks.

- Incorporating music/ movement/ games/ non-digital multi-modal activities in quick succession is very powerful. It keeps engagement high but means the learning is reinforced in different ways.

- Things can move quite quickly with these learning intentions if you are consistent - rinse and repeat, then on to the next thing.

Different to my practice

Realistically, my students would get through 2, maybe 3 different activities a session. This included some online slides, a paper based task and then maths whizz or a learning game/ video/ times tables challenge etc. with their group. My tasks would take quite a lot longer than those done by the five year olds. Obviously this makes sense as their attention span is longer, but they could have a few more short activities followed by a longer one for example.

My Intervention

For my high performing students (achieving at and above), keep my teaching similar, adding in a few more songs or activities at their level. They need to be solving level 5 maths problems, which take longer and are meatier. They also showed great progress in the 6 months I taught them last year, so they don't need the same level of intervention. I will keep these students as one large group - the span of my other learners is too large and this group can cope with being together.

For my students below and well below - change up their program so they have shorter slides and do different activities throughout the lesson. I envision them all coming together for some activities and others being taught in group time. E.g. beginning the lesson with a song or game that introduces/ reinforces a core concept then differentiating the next activity for each group, while the others rotate between slides/ video/ maths whizz/ paper based activities/ mini maths activities like timestable challenges (on/offline).

I will keep visiting the junior classes to build up my repertoire of really simple games and activities. I will modify these to suit the age of my learners, but want to really build up their feelings of success.