A new semester meant a fresh start to try some new things in my maths classroom that would hopefully turn the dial of cognitive demand to appropriately awesome. Here’s what I did with my clean slate: I read The Classroom Chef These guys (Matt Vaudrey & John Stevens) hit the nail on the head repetitively without…
Every time I teach something, I want to teach it again straight away. Why? Because on the second time around, the teachable moments are far more obvious and, perhaps, more frequent. As a compulsive dad-joke teller (often seen as a pre-requisite for maths teachers), I will do anything to maintain the attention of the young…
Reports… What would you want your report to look like? Reports, the time of year when we, as teachers, have to flawlessly write comments that are less descriptive, less critical, and less meaningful than the conversations we have with our students about their actual progress or overall performance in our classes. What is more important…
I can honestly say that the social media platform that I thought was absolutely useless has significantly changed the way I teach. This wasn’t the first time this has happened in my short experience as a teacher. If you have read my blog, which most people apart from myself haven’t, you may know about the…
Yes, if you were one of the few that have read my blog before, and possibly even noticed the name of my blog, whenwillineedthis was the previous title and url. This question is one that not only wrangles its way into students’ minds but even their teachers. This post originally came from a very negative…
Through teaching, I’ve learnt many mathematical concepts at a much deeper level and I am often left asking myself, “why didn’t my teacher teach me like this?” The ways students are learning maths at school has massively changed over the past 5(ish) years. What students are doing in lessons has been influenced by the availability…
This post comes from some reading I did about Flipped Classroom approach. Upon looking at what flipping lessons involved, I found myself looking closer at my own practice and understanding how it is different to the flipped approach. The conclusion I came to was that it is the complete opposite.
Sometimes a Professional Learning workshop can make you think. Sometimes they can make you so sleepy that you question whether there was any caffeine in that triple shot latte latte you just finished. Sometimes they can make you question how you teach and excite you to try new things. Luckily for me, I went to…
On Friday, I invited a first year teacher from my school to sit in on one of my Maths lessons. When I mentioned it to her, she leapt at the opportunity to see how someone else taught. I didn’t really have much of an idea about whether the lesson was going to be overly exciting,…
For the past eighteen months (three quarters of my teaching career), I have been teaching at least one “All-Boys” Maths class. Many of my pondering posts have been about teaching such classes, with some explicitly referring to the context in which I teach them; Year 10 and 11 students in the same class, sometimes sharing the…
How I teach maths. 