My learning journey, I would comfortably say, really began nearly four years ago. August 4 2014, I was the lucky person from my school picked to go to a professional development session about a new way of teaching problem-based learning activities. Having nearly forgotten that I was supposed to go, I truly had no idea…
8:33am I’ve just finished a conversation with a colleague to frantically finish/start planning how the hell I was going to teach solving quadratics to my Year 10s and 11s at 8.40am. I posted this photo on Twitter the night before the lesson, probably while procrastinating from actually planning the next morning’s maths lesson: This is…
Just over a month ago, Jason Loke (@Jason_Loke) tagged me in the video below and asked me, “What can you do with this?”. It wasn’t the first or last time that Jason had done this, but I thought that I could actually do something with it. I later found out that there was a hashtag…
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…
Over the past few weeks, I have been working with a small group of Final-Year Pre-Service Maths teachers. As part of their Education degree at Flinders University, they have to complete classroom observations of Maths teachers against the Teaching for Effective Learning (TfEL) Framework. Additionally, I am lucky enough to be one of the teachers…
Problem Based Learning in Mathematics – how can we authentically respond to the students’ needs while maintaining the appropriate level of challenge, harnessing student interest, and helping them connect their prior knowledge with new content that they see as useful and important?
Investigating the mathematical prices of pizzas
Lesson here. So today I asked my Year 12 Maths Studies students if they have ever bought a Mars Bar during the “Free Bars” Promotion where 1 in every 6 bars wins a free Mars Bar. A few hands around the classroom went up and we were discussing who had the longest run of free…
Learning how to create Cubic and Quartic regression models and apply them to analyse Australian Rules Football statistics – 3-Act Maths
How I teach maths. 