Every year I set a development priority for my department, and this becomes the focus of our 'DPD' sessions throughout the year (DPD is 'department professional development'). We focused on challenge in the past two years and I think we've done a great job with that - we got 17% Grade 9 at GCSE last year (we're a totally non-selective school and for comparison, the other comprehensive schools in our borough had an average of 6% Grade 9s last year). As much as I love talking about challenge, I think now is a good time to shift our focus to how we can improve the way we support our lowest attaining students.
There are various strategies we adopt that are probably fairly standard (e.g. students are taught in sets, and we have very large top sets to ensure our lower attainers can be taught in smaller groups, normally with TA support). We also run Entry Level Certificate for our Year 10/11 students who are likely to struggle to achieve higher than a Grade 2 at GCSE.
The focus in our DPD sessions is on what happens in the classroom, for example how we use techniques such as gradual release and example problem pairs and how we choose appropriate tasks for our lower attaining students.
It's been a while since I've taught very low attainers. Before my school had a Sixth Form, when I had capacity in my timetable to teach Years 7 - 10, I considered middle sets to be my area of expertise. In Year 11 I typically teach the 'borderline' GCSE group (the bottom group in Higher Tier - for us that's Set 5 out of 8, and my challenge is to turn their grades from 4s and 5s into 6s and 7s). The last time I taught very low attainers was five years ago. At the time I thought hard about the best approaches to take, and blogged about some of the strategies I tried (see posts like
Five for Five and
Classroom Reflections). But now that 'teaching low attainers' is our department focus, and it's me who has to lead the CPD on this, I'm keen to read all related research and hear what other teachers do. I was fortunate to attend an excellent session at #mathsconf39 called 'Unlocking Potential: My Experience Teaching Low Prior Attainers in KS4', delivered by Heidi Morris. Often sessions about teaching low attainers are solely about manipulatives so it was refreshing to hear a range of ideas in this workshop. Heidi talked about how she motivates her students and the techniques she uses to make topics accessible and memorable. For example, she talked about 'GCSE Fridays' when they do scaffolded and repeated GCSE question practice, rather than introducing new content when they're tired at the end of the week.
Tasks with Scaffolding
In today's post my focus is on scaffolded resources. If you aren't familiar with the term scaffolding in this context and you want to read more about it, I recommend Jamie Clark's excellent
one pager.
Maths teachers are so lucky to have an abundance of high quality resources to choose from when planning lessons. There are absolutely loads of tasks that are brilliant for middle and high attaining students, but if you're teaching a small class of Key Stage 3 or 4 students who are working at GCSE Grades 0 - 2, it can sometimes be difficult to find suitable resources. Teachers don't have time to make their own resources, but I feel this is something that teachers of the lowest attainers have to do fairly often. In this post I thought it might be helpful to showcase what's available and think about some design principles.
Factorising Quadratics For All
At my school all of our Key Stage 3 classes study the same curriculum. After half term Year 9 will be factorising quadratics. This is a topic that some lower attaining students actually quite enjoy as it's heavy on procedure and light on reasoning. But the big barrier to success in this topic is fluency in times tables and fluency in working with negative numbers.
I've attempted to design four tasks for this topic, each with a different level of scaffolding and challenge.
The tasks shown below are designed for different classes, but they all practise exactly the same skill: factorising monic quadratics with positive numbers. The first two tasks are intended to be projected on the board (i.e. students copy each question into their exercise book), the second two would be printed (when teaching low attainers we don't want to add unnecessary challenge, and for some students copying from the board can be very difficult).
In this lesson on factorising positive quadratics, the teacher would model a couple of examples (known as the 'I do' phase of the lesson) and then in the 'you do' phase there may be some cold calling or mini whiteboards. The tasks below are designed for the 'you do' phase of the lesson where students do independent practice. Have a look at the difference between each task.
 |
| High attainers |
 |
| Mid/higher attainers |
 |
| Mid/lower attainers |
 |
| Lower attainers |
In the first task above you can see there's lots of practice to develop fluency, bearing in mind 'top set' students would complete these very quickly (this is a short task - probably five to ten minutes). There are some questions at the end that are slightly different to the modelled examples, to get students thinking. After reviewing the answers and discussing methods for the more challenging questions, the teacher would probably move onto factorising with negatives in the same lesson.
In the second task above, which is designed for a 'middle set', the challenge questions are separated and an example is provided to remind students of the technique.
You can see how the amount of scaffolding increases throughout the tasks, which become increasingly more suitable for lower attainers. There are other methods for factorising quadratics (e.g. using grids) that might help too - but this post is about task design rather than methods.
I've put all four tasks on
TES in case they're helpful. They can easily be adapted to include negatives too. I'm not an expert task designer - the purpose of me creating these tasks was to showcase different levels of challenge and scaffolding that are possible within the same topic.
Sources of Scaffolded Resources There are some great websites which have scaffolded resources. Here are some examples:
What have I missed? If you know a good source of scaffolded tasks, please comment below.
Also, here's a challenge for you: it would be fantastic if some of my readers had a go at what I've done above for factorising quadratics. Pick a topic and design three or four different tasks that all practise the same skill but are scaffolded differently, for different types of students. Please share what you come up with!
Welcome to my 193rd gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.
