Let me start by saying, I don’t think that my way of teaching is the best, nor do I expect that every one ought to be teaching the way that I do. I think each teacher has their own style and way of engaging with their students. I found myself creating the four or five…
Disclaimer: This post is purely about my own experience about teaching maths without worksheets. This isn’t an attempt to discredit the validity of all worksheets… just most of them. This semester, I set a challenge to myself to refrain from handing out any worksheets during lesson or for homework. I did this because I felt…
Last Friday, we took a massive leap in what we hope is a forward direction. The Maths coordinator (@Jason_Loke) and I gave our students a summative assessment task that could potentially change the way we assess students in maths. In South Australia, we have two main types of assessment in mathematics: Folio Tasks (Mathematical Investigations) and…
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…
Recently, I have been utilising Open Middle problems more and more. What I particularly like about these problems is the sense of challenge that drives students to find a possible answer. After using many awesome problems directly from the Open Middle website, I decided to have a go at writing my own and use these develop…
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…
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…
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…
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…
How I teach maths. 