Hello all

Apologies that the bulletin is a bit late this week, I have been distracted by all of the exam reviews. It has been very interesting to analyse all the data from the summer examinations. Here are some highlights:

• 80% of the cohort from Bluecoat Wollaton achieved grade 4+ which was the highest proportion to achieve a standard pass there since the days we were allowed to enter our students for their Maths GCSE as many times as we wanted.
• Looking at the same measure, the proportion of grade 4+ achieved at BBA has essentially doubled within the last 2 academic years which is phenomenal!
• The smallest gap between SEN and non SEN students attainment was achieved at NES. Across the country and all subjects the gap between SEN and non SEN is the largest but not with last years Y11 cohort at NES.
• BAA achieved the largest proportion of students achieving a grade 7+ across all schools within the trust and achieved a positive progress score for A’Level Maths at Bluecoat Aspley Sixth Form.

I am now busy looking at the eAQA Question-Level analysis and will be sharing the findings of that with you all very soon.

Over the weekend both Nick and I read this blog about teaching mixed attainment. Its well worth a read: Mixed Attainment Teaching Mistakes.

Hope you all have a great week

Louise

 

 

 

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Hello all

This past fortnight I have attended INSET sessions at NES and the TeachMeet’s at BAA and both have spoken about the value of collaborative learning so in this bulletin I would like to talk a little about a collaborative learning strategy that I have planned into a Year 10 lesson (lesson 9). Before I do here is some information from the EEF about collaborative learning:

What is collaborative learning?

A cooperative learning approach that involves pupils working together on activities or learning tasks in a group small enough for everyone to participate on a collective task that has been clearly assigned. Pupils in the group may work on separate tasks contributing to a common overall outcome, or work together on a shared task.

How effective can it be?

The impact of collaborative approaches on learning is consistently positive. However, the size of impact varies, so it is important to get the detail right. Effective collaborative learning requires much more than just sitting pupils together and asking them to work in a group; structured approaches with well-designed tasks lead to the greatest learning gains. There is some evidence that collaboration can be supported with competition between groups, but this is not always necessary, and can lead to learners focusing on the competition rather than the learning it aims to support. Approaches which promote talk and interaction between learners tend to result in the best gains.

More information from the EEF can be found here: EEF on Collaborative Learning

Numbered Heads Together

This is my long term favorite collaborative learning strategy. If you haven’t heard of it before here is a video detailing its structure: Numbered Heads Together in action

In my experience using this strategy motivates students to share their expertise and listen to each other, value alternative approaches and makes the whole team accountable. The clear, timed structure reduces opportunities for students to become off task too. If you haven’t used this approach before please try it this half term (even if you don’t teach Year 10) and let me know how it goes!

Useful Websites

Thank you to Paul at NES and Michelle at BWA for recently sharing with their departments some of the following:

Increasingly difficult questions – stretch and challenge within practice

SSDD Problems – Same surface, Different Deep Structure from Craig Barton

Variation Theory – intelligent, varied practice from Craig Barton

Maths Visuals at KS2 – fabulous animations for basic numeracy

BossMaths – lesson powerpoints for every single Mathematical concept in the curriculum

There are so many fantastic resources online, do continue to share what you find!

Hope you all have a great week

Kind Regards

Louise

 

 

Hi all

Hope your first week back has gone well!

Year 10 Lessons – Trigonometry

I hope you are finding these lessons easy to follow and effective at securing your pupils’ understanding of the Sine Ratio. These lessons introduce trigonometry much slower than perhaps you have introduced trigonometry before. This is intentional with the aim being to support a deep understanding of Trigonometry instead of focusing in on the SOHCAH TOA formulae. There is an interesting article in the NCETM about this here:

NCTEM Article about T&L of Trig

Having observed a few of us teaching these lessons I have noticed that some staff preferring to teach students how to label a right angled-triangle first. This isn’t necessary; to access the Sine ratio students only need to be introduced to the opposite side as they will hopefully be able to identify the hypotenuse already from their knowledge of Pythagoras Theorem in Year 9. The adjacent side is introduced in Lesson 5 – Understanding Cosine. I am busy uploading more of these lessons this week, if you have any amazing resources that you think would make a good addition to our Year 10 lessons please do share them with me.

e-AQA

AQA provide a free enhanced results analysis for all teachers. The information you can get from this service is really valuable and interesting. For example, at BAA last year’s Y11 higher tier cohort significantly under performed with the ratio questions in comparison to other similar centres despite ratio and proportion being a focus in the spring term.

The Year 10 mock also flagged up this as an area of comparable weakness so clearly we need to focus more on this area with our current Year 11 at BAA. The medium term plans have already been altered to ensure this happens.

E-AQA allows us to look at individual questions too. This question from the Foundation tier tripped up a larger proportion of students at BAA compared to all students nationally: (24% of BAA students got it correct compared to 44% nationally)

Whereas BAA students did better on average with this question from Paper 2 on the Higher tier:

 

Interesting stuff that can perhaps highlight areas of strengths and weakness within our own teaching so if you haven’t signed up and had a look yet please do! To gain access you need to know your schools centre number and your exams officer to authorize you.

BWA Mathleates Marathon in a Month challenge

Adam, Michelle and I have half completed our challenge after running the Great North Run yesterday. It was a fantastic day and we are already planning for next year, I think we are going to run it dressed up as Maths equipment. Pairs of compasses maybe? We are already 76% into our target of raising £500 for the MS Society. If you would like to donate here is the link:

JustGiving Marathon in a Month Page

Louise

 

 

Hello everyone, welcome back and a warm welcome to those staff new to the Archway Learning Trust. I hope everyone has had a fantastic summer break and is excited for the new school year ahead. I am very excited to be starting my new role as assistant principal for responsibility for Mathematics across the trust at last!

You will see that I have made some changes to the scheme of learning over the summer. The Year 7 curriculum is being updated in response to the improving standards at Key Stage 2. The vast majority of our feeder primary schools are now teaching for mastery and as a result we are seeing students join us more confident and fluent with the KS2 curriculum than ever before. Lots of our Year 7 students are eager to learn new concepts and are excited to be challenged in their Maths lessons as they join us at secondary school. I am working with the East Midlands East Maths Hub and the Maths departments within the trust to ensure that the Year 7 lessons continue to be developed to stretch our higher prior attainers whilst also support all learners to make excellent progress. We must however be mindful that the SATS were taken by our Year 7 students almost 4 months ago now and not all students will join us confident and fluent with the number skills required to be successful at secondary school so some consolidation of KS2 concepts will always be necessary for some students. Do make good use of numeracy ninjas each lesson, this resource has been designed to fill gaps in students’ numeracy skills and maintain/build fluency. Students should always be given the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and the numeracy ninjas focus worksheets are an excellent intervention. They can be found here: www.numeracyninjas.org/?page_id=165

My vision is to create a 4 year mastery curriculum with Year 11 classes following bespoke medium term plans based prior assessment and exam analysis. Nick from BBA has shared his Year 11 medium term plans on here already so please do take a look. Thank you Nick! There will be further guidance from Heads of Maths about the Year 11 plans. Right now I am busy developing and uploading the Year 10 lessons that follow our Year 7, 8 and 9 scheme. Any feedback on these lessons in particular would be greatly appreciated.

Other changes this year include the CAF. Common Assessment Framework. Essentially all schools across the trust will be completing at least 2 common formal assessments. These assessments will be uploaded on here and will follow this schedule:

Year 7	End of Spring 1 Concepts and skills assessed: Autumn 1 – 20% Autumn 2 – 40% Spring 1 – 40%	End of Year Concepts and Skills assessed: Autumn – 20% Spring – 40% Summer 1 – 40%
Year 8	End of Autumn 1 Concepts and skills assessed: Autumn 1 – 40% Y7 Summer/Spring 2 – 40% Y7 Spring 1/Autumn – 40%	End of Year Concepts and skills assessed: Summer/Spring 2 – 40% Spring 1/Autumn – 40% Year 7 – 20%
Year 9	End of Spring 1 Concepts and skills assessed: Autumn – 40% Spring 1 – 40% Year 8 – 20%	End of Year Concepts and skills assessed: Summer/Spring 2 – 40% Spring 1/Autumn – 40% Year 8 – 20%
Year 10	End of Autumn 2 Concepts and skills assessed: Autumn 1 – 40% Autumn 2 – 40% Year 9 – 20%	End of Year Mock Examination
Year 11	End of Autumn 1 Mock Examination 1	End of Spring 1 Mock Examination 2

This year I am entering my 15th year of Maths teaching and despite this I still get a bit nervous about teaching again after the lovely, long summer break. This week I have been listening to this: www.mrbartonmaths.com/blog/slice-of-advice-what-does-the-first-lesson-with-your-class-look-like/  Please do smile before Christmas, whilst I believe first lessons should be very formal with clear boundaries set I will still smile at some point. Hopefully. Adam from BWA shared this first lesson power point with me last year and I found it really useful so please feel free to adapt it and use it. Thank you Adam.

Welcome Lesson 2018

I will hopefully see you all at some point this week, if you would like anything in the bulletin please let me know.

Kind Regards

Louise

 

A big thank you for all of your contributions at this half term’s MAT pedagogy session. What a luxury it is to have the time to be able to work with colleagues from across our trust and share our experience and best practice. Thank you also to the SCITT team for allowing us to host the session there and use their facilities.

Whilst we knew that ratio and proportion would be assessed more in the new GCSE it was interesting to see the emphasis on relating ratios to fractions and to linear functions in the November 2017 examination. From the session it became clear that our expectations of how students should best answer these questions does vary considerably. More work needs to be done with our KS4 students, in particular, to enable them to be more successful with this concept and lessons are already being developed at BAA and BWA to enable this. Additionally the focus for next half terms CPD sessions at Emmanuel also includes the teaching and learning of ratio. I look forward to sharing all of this work with you at our future MAT pedagogy sessions.

Have a look at our favourite approaches which are attached below:

Ratio and Proportion Solutions

If you have yet to register for e-AQA or AllAboutMaths please do so using the links here:

e-AQA

AllAboutMaths

Thank you too for all of your warm wishes regarding my recent appointment to Assistant Principal with responsibility for Mathematics across the trust. I am very excited by the opportunity to work with you all to improve the teaching and learning and attainment of Mathematics across our trust.

Our next MAT Pedagogy session is due to take place on 22^nd March at Bluecoat Beechdale Academy at 3:45pm.

Kind Regards

Louise

 

 

Thank you to Emmanuel for hosting this half term’s MAT pedagogy session. It’s great to get to know our new colleagues and to start working together more regularly.

The documents from the session are attached below. I would encourage departments to work collaboratively to complete the Key Learning Point Breakdown sheet when planning new units of work, particularly for our GCSE lessons. As these are not centrally planned there is a danger that everyone could end up working separately to plan lessons on the same topic. With so much experience and so many people in the Maths departments across the Trust it would be foolish not to take advantage of this. Maybe departments could take an upcoming topic each, break down the key objective from the GCSE specification into key learning points and create a sheet for each to share across the Trust.

Over time, the GCSE area on the website could then be broken into Key Learning Points for each topic with a link to the Key Learning Point Breakdown sheets. Teachers could then use these as a starting point for their planning on these topics.

Here are the documents from Thursday’s session:

MAT pedagogy session 2
Teaching for Mastery at Secondary + 5 big ideas
Key Learning Point Breakdown

Here are some examples of completed Key Learning Point Breakdown sheets. These were completed by colleagues from the Maths Hubs Secondary Mastery programme. They are just rough drafts at the moment, but we do hope to tidy them up and add to them over the year.

Example of completed Key Learning Point Breakdown

If you do complete any sheets it would be great if we could share these with the Maths Hubs. If departments across the country work on these and collate them centrally, it would save all of us a lot of work!

Thank you also to Adam for his presentation on raising the profile of numeracy across the school. There were some lovely ideas that we can take. I particularly liked the Brilliant Individuals Doing Maths Around School. Genius!

Adam also mentioned the Christmaths activities they would be doing over at Wollaton this year. Here is a link to last year’s Christmaths activities. If you do have any new ones to add, please send them over so they can be added to the page.

Christmaths activities

The NRich advent calendar is also a really nice resource to use every day in the run up to Christmas. It’s here if you haven’t seen it already:

NRich 2017 Secondary Advent Calendar

Enjoy the last two weeks everyone and have a fabulous Christmas if I don’t see you before.

Matilde

Hello everyone, and a special welcome to our Emmanuel colleagues.

MAT pedagogy session

This year’s bulletins will start with a summary of the MAT sessions. You will also find any presentations and documents from the sessions here.

Our first Archway MAT maths session looked at the big idea of variation through the lens of coordinate geometry.

The two AQA GCSE coordinate geometry exam questions were not answered well nationally this year. As with many of the new-style exam questions, they were not standard questions.  We looked at how we can build similar non standard questions into lessons and how we can encourage students to think of the problems in as many different ways as they can, in order to prepare them for these unfamiliar questions.

MAT pedagogy session 1

The lesson we studied  was taken from the ICCAMS pilot study. The lesson plan and related documents have now been written into the Year 9 Autumn 2 scheme of work. The lesson is Lesson 1 Points on a Line.  Lessons 1 – 4 are all taken from the ICCAMS project.

Festival of Learning

It was great to be able to spend three hours as a group of maths teachers.  Our theme was ‘Communicating mathematically’ to link in with the literacy focus of writing. The first session looked at how we can bridge the gap between students’ informal whiteboard work and their formal written work.

We investigated how we could use journals in our lessons. We wrote our own group journals displaying the methods we had used to solve the ‘Points on a line’ problem from the previous evening’s session.

If you try using journals  in the next half term, it would be great to see how it went. Please could you share some examples of how you organised it with your classes, and some photos of the results. Please email me at mwarden@bluecoat.uk.com

Here is a link to the Powerpoint that was used.

For the next session, Nick Wilson from Beechdale talked to us about using the Formative Assessment lessons from the Maths Assessment Project website. He used the Baseball Jerseys lesson to focus on comparing student responses. This is a really useful method for modelling good examples of written work.  The writing frame was particularly useful and can be used for any lessons that compare pre-prepared student work. In the Year 9 scheme of work, there are two lessons from the Maths Assessment Project that have the opportunity to compare student work: “Baseball journeys”and  “Finding a measure of slope”.

Here is a link to Nick’s presentation and materials.

Desmos classroom

For those of you who are using the Year 9 Scheme of work, some of the lessons have now been posted.  There are some related lessons in Year 7 that our current Year 9 won’t have used yet. I have written them as ‘pre-lessons’ on the unit page. Please use them if you think they will be useful.

You will also notice that there are some computer based Desmos Classroom lessons from lesson 9 onwards.  Desmos classroom is an excellent tool where teachers can keep track of and share the work of all students from their computers.

The lessons require some preparation.  I have added the teacher guides to the lesson pages so you have enough time to prepare. If you have departmental time before the lessons, it would be useful to work through these as a group.

Have a fantastic holiday, and I’ll see you all again at the next MAT session.

Matilde

Hello Maths,

The Friday bulletin is back after a short break. I was intending to write one last weekend while I was on the revision weekend with Beechdale year 11’s but I was having way too much fun. No, really! The weekend was organised to give students who don’t usually have a good space to work at home the opportunity fill the weekend before their exams with lots of good quality revision. They did 13 hours of maths and English in total, and lots of relaxing outdoor activities too. The kids have come back buzzing, if a little tired.

So, our exams are now well under way with C1 and Core Maths done this week. As well as C2, we obviously have our first glimpse of the new GCSE this week. The rumours are that the AQA practices sets 3 and 4 are the most similar to the actual paper as they were written alongside it. I know my class are hoping it’s not too much like practice set 4! Imagine opening up the first paper and seeing this as the first question…

They actually much preferred the last question on the paper:

They have finally realised that the new papers are not like the old ones. They can attempt questions all the way through the paper, not just the supposedly easier questions at the beginning.

The schemes of work for Summer 1 for years 7 and 8 are now complete.  There won’t be any more lessons added before half term, so if you have lessons left over, please use the time to recap content form the start of the year in preparation for the end of year assessments. I will start to upload Summer 2 lessons over the next week. The Summer 2 topics will not be covered in assessments.

You may have seen on social media that Maths teachers around the country will be celebrating Malcolm Swan day on Tuesday to mark his funeral which takes place on Tuesday.  If you do any activities with your classes, please can you send me photos so that I can send them to his colleagues, who will be sharing the tributes with Malcolm’s family. If you use Twitter and you want to share them on there too, the hashtag is #malcolmswanday.  A fitting tribute, I’m sure you agree.

Whenever people ask me who my hero is, I always say Malcolm Swan. Malcolm sadly passed away earlier this week, so I wanted to share a few memories with you.

As all Maths teachers who completed their PGCE at Nottingham University, I was brought up with Malcolm’s Shell Centre material in the early days and in later years, this box of magic:

Many of these tasks have appeared in my schemes of work over the years. The ‘Always, Sometimes, Never’ tasks and the questioning stems ‘Show me an example of… and another, and another…’ are staples of any Maths scheme of work. Many more brilliant lessons have appeared recently on the Mathshell website (Math-shell, not Maths-Hell) which hosts the Mathematics Assessment Project, which is part of the Maths Design Collaborative initiated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. You will probably recognise some of the content on there as I have used many of the lessons on the year 7 and 8 schemes.

My personal memories though, have been in recent years. When I started working for the Maths Hub, I was incredibly fortunate to work with Malcolm on several occasions. I was in awe every time we were at meetings together, but he always spoke to me and everyone in the room as if we were his friends.

He turned up at my very first Curriculum Development day with some colleagues from the University. He said he’d just stay for the morning – I was just stunned that he’d come at all! During the morning break he said to me ‘I’ve just written a paper about something that will link really nicely with what you were talking about this morning. Would you like me to share it with everyone? It will take about an hour.’ Well, that’s like playing a gig at your local pub and David Bowie coming up and asking if he could jam along with you, and actually, would you mind if he played his new song? Malcolm ended up staying for the rest of the day too. At the end he told me that my presentation was ‘very good’ and that he’d really enjoyed the day. Possibly one of my best moments ever.

He didn’t charge for coming along that day, and he never charged for any other events we held that he attended. He would come along and act as ‘Koshi’ (The knowledgable other) for open Lesson Studies and offer advice on the lesson plans beforehand.

Before he became ill, he was helping me to plan a Lesson Study course and conference that shared the findings of the LeMaPS project.  Malcolm, along with others at the University had introduced me to this and I learnt so much through his work. There had been a LeMaPS website, and I was saying we should update it ready for the course. Malcolm said ‘I’ll do that’. Then I needed a speaker – ‘I’ll do that’. ‘Can I borrow that video of you acting as Koshi?’ (see below). He gave me a memory stick with all his Powerpoints and videos. For free.  He did things like that all the time.

He was the most knowledgeable, inspirational, kind and humble man. Although he will be truly missed, I have no doubt I will be using his lessons for the rest of my career, and will continue to ask students for another, and another…

Welcome back everyone. I hope you all had a restful holiday and a productive week back.

This half term is all about years 11 and sixth form and getting them ready for their exams. New resources are popping up all the time, so do share if you find any new and useful ones. I like these from Mathsbox.

They are useful for quick skills revision and could be made into booklets for students to work through. They can be found here. Click on the link for GCSE Assessment.  They also have some short problem solving questions which are nice for a quick starter or settler to  lessons. These will be added to over time.

Due to the focus on exam classes, we won’t be having any assessments for other years this half term. We will just have end of year testing for years 7 to 10.  There will be just one paper for years 7-9 and two papers for year 10. These will be take place towards the end of the year and will be staggered to spread out the marking load.

While I was writing the most recent year 8 lessons, I rediscovered Numberphile. I had managed to wean myself off it after a brief addiction a couple of years agao,  but have now discovered lots of new videos that I haven’t seen! If you haven’t watched any of their videos, then have a look here.  A nice one to share with classes is this one which shows a card trick based on the number 27:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7lP9y7Bb5g&w=560&h=315]

Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Matilde