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…
Creating wonder in the classroom is even better when you’re discovering things with the students. My terrible habit of preparing for lessons 5-10 minutes before they start is becoming more frequent, and scarily, more successful. Yesterday morning, in the ritual dance of having a shower, getting dressed, and making my coffee before leaving for work,…
This semester, I have the most challenging class that I have ever taught and I am incredibly grateful. For just over two years, I have gone through many weeks feeling like I have “nailed the lesson”. I have walked out of the classroom having felt like my students were engaged, seeing them solve real…
They say that one of the best ways to learn something at a deeper level is to teach it to someone else. Over my first three years I have been doing exactly that, learning through teaching. Through my four year teaching degree, I learnt a lot about the different contexts that my students may…
Whether it’s picking the trigger happy judge on The Voice or the next raw egg in Jimmy Fallon’s Egg Roulette, television shows are rich with potential lessons for your classroom. As a Maths teacher, I use my powers of finding what the students enjoy and ruining it with what they hate – maths problems. I…
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…
How I teach maths. 