5 Maths Gems #200

Welcome to my 200^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. MathsPad
MathsPad's May and July updates includes lots of fantastic new resources.

Their Topic Key Facts Sheets are designed in a two-column question and answer format, so that pupils can self-test by covering up the second column. Very helpful for revision at Key Stage 3 and 4, they can be found at the top right of their curriculum pages.

MathsPad has also shared two packs of 'Grade 9 Club' Question Packs: Pack A and Pack B. These include worked solutions for each question. 

They have also published a series of Foundation One Markers containing non-calculator one mark questions for GCSE Foundation on a mixture of topics. The skills recur from one sheet to the next, so pupils get repeated practice of each skill.

There's other new resources too, including more in the Building Blocks range (aimed at secondary school students who need support with the basics), more Higher GCSE revision packs, and an inverse functions matching activity. We love MathsPad at my school - it's well worth the subscription.

2. X Why
Andy of m4th5.co.uk has shared a graphing tool for classroom use: X Why. It can be used to see graph transformations happen, draw instant inverses, put your own labels on curves and points, see integrals and areas under curves, draw tangents and normals and much more. Graphs can be exported to worksheets and presentations, and axes are auto-scaled for degrees and radians.

3. NCETM Professional Development Materials

The final set of the NCETM's Key Stage 4 Professional Development Materials is now available, completing the full suite of Secondary Mastery Professional Development Materials for both KS3 and KS4. This set covers Key Stage 4 Geometry including transformations, circle theorems, trigonometry and 3D shapes. As with the other sets, these materials contain lots of fantastic ideas for getting your students thinking. For example, there's a task where students are asked to identify which of the diagrams correctly show the alternate segment theorem.

I also like what they've done here with bearings diagrams in non-standard orientations...

... and I like relating vectors to throwing a ball.

4. A level 
In my last lesson with Year 12 this Friday I will be teaching Year 2 Binomial Expansion with Partial Fractions - I never understand how anyone manages to fit the entire A level curriculum into such limited time! I'm perpetually running behind with my A level classes. But if you have a spare lesson with Year 12 at the end of term, they might enjoy this murder mystery revision task from Danielle @PixiMaths. You can download it here.

Another A Level resource that caught my eye recently was a set of statistics tasks posted by MrLevMaths. Read his blog post for more.

5. Esheets and Whiteboard Workouts
I discovered two websites that aren't new, but I've not seen them before. 

esheets.io from Richard Linnington features self marking worksheets, maths puzzles and games (including end of term maths activities) and teacher visualisation tools. I particularly like the sheep tethered to a building and sheep with a sliding ring.

Whiteboard Workouts from southportmaths.co.uk are PowerPoints that are designed for mini whiteboard questioning.

A Milestone
I started this blog whilst on maternity leave in April 2014. My first post was about a method for matrix multiplication. A lot of my earlier posts were about methods. Later I started writing more about resources. I wrote my first gems post in August 2014, when I realised that there were loads of great ideas and resources being shared on Twitter that needed to be shared more widely, so that all the maths teachers in the country (and beyond) could see them, not just the teachers using social media. Over the years I've been contacted by many teachers who tell me that they find these posts helpful, so I continue to write them. There are a number of authors and websites that have 'found fame' after they featured in my posts! 

Today I've published my 518th blog post, which is the 200th post in the Maths Gems series. I used to post gems posts every week, but it was impossible to continue posting so frequently as my daughters grew older, and my school workload increased. Now I try to write one gems post a month, but it can be difficult to find enough material since the mass exodus of maths teachers from Twitter. Back when the new GCSE was introduced in 2017, social media was packed full of teachers sharing resources and helping each other out - with another curriculum change on the horizon, maybe we will regain some of that magic once day. In the meantime, I will endeavour to continue posting once a month. If you're new to my blog then I recommend having a look at my back catalogue of gems posts. There's a lot of great stuff in them. 

Events
I had a fantastic time at the MEI Conference as always. I attended on Thursday evening for the dinner and drinks (free bar courtesy of Casio!) and all day on the Friday. I presented on methods to a lovely audience, and enjoyed trying some incredibly difficult geometry problems with Bernard Murphy. Sue Black's keynote was excellent. Shout out to Marc the tutor who sat with me and Megan Guinan after my session and showed us a fun method for factorising non-monic quadratics.

Looking ahead at events that are coming up...

• On the last two days of the summer term my headteacher has kindly given me permission to attend the Future of Maths Education event which is being held by XTX Markets. This is an invite-only event and I'm delighted to be on the guest list. I believe I'm the only teacher attending - in fact I have to go there directly after running a Year 7 trip so I'm expecting to be thoroughly exhausted... but I am really looking forward to it. 
• Mathsconf41 has been announced - it's taking place in Liverpool on 5th September. A conference at the very start of the academic year is a fantastic idea - the perfect timing to inspire and motivate. I'm not sure yet whether I'll attend - as both a mum of teenagers and Head of Department I have a feeling I'll have a million things to do that weekend. But I hate to miss a mathsconf so I will have to have a think about this one!
• BCME 10 is a big deal in the world of maths education, and it takes place in Nottingham on October 23rd and 24th. I loved the last BCME in 2018. To cut the cost for teachers, bursaries and early bird rates are available but you have to act now to take advantage of these opportunities (the deadline for bursaries is this week! And the early bird rate is valid until the end of July). Information about bursaries is here. I would apply for one myself but my school isn't in an area of high deprivation so I don't qualify. I really encourage teachers who meet the criteria to apply for a bursary to help cover the cost - it's so important that teachers attend this conference.

Update

What an insanely busy time at school! Our classrooms were sweltering when it was 37 degrees and we had a few early closures in response to parent concerns about students travelling home in the extreme weather. We also had new staff induction and Sports Day last week (Sports Day picture of my maths team below - minus four members who were busy elsewhere!). Plus I've been hosting lots of visitors in my department who come to see my curriculum in action and find out how we do things. This week is Open Evening and Year 10 are on work experience, and then the following week there are a whole load of trips to run. As I said in my post Tasks for the Summer Term, this time of year is always surprisingly busy! And the delay of SATs results will have me working in the summer holidays (even more so than usual) because I use them for Year 7 groupings.

Have a great week! Thanks for reading.

5 Math Gems #199

Welcome to my 199^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. Trimension

Following on from the release of Vectorama (Gems 197) and Graphiti (Gems 196), Neil Kendall has completed a third project 'Trimension'. This tool allows the construction of 3D models to help illustrate 3D Pythagoras and trigonometry problems. The key feature is the ability to extract internal triangles into a flat diagram. Neil has included four pre-built examples from past GCSE papers to illustrate what it can do (just go to add > examples).

This is a fantastic tool for teaching 3D Pythagoras and trignonomety - thank you Neil!

2. Interwoven Maths

Nathan Day (‪@nathanday) has made some updates to his excellent website interwovenmaths.com, including a new page of small tasks and a contents page showing all the resources and ideas now available on the site.

There's loads to explore on Interwoven Maths including this Quadratics Always Sometimes Never.

Nathan also shared Class Duels - a maths game featuring over fifty topics from across Key Stage 3 to 5. It can be played in two-player mode (split screen, which can be done on an interactive whiteboard) and single-player mode. 

3. Exam Countdown

Nathan Day also shared a newly updated Edexcel Exam Countdown page which includes both GCSE and A level (including Further Maths) and shows dates for 2027. Interestingly, there are two GCSE papers before half term next year, and A level Paper 1 is before half term too.

4. A level

@andrewmaths1 posted a link to a website that I've not seen before. mathstutorneri.com is great for students aiming for an A*. There's a booklet of challenge problems and a set of exam papers.

It's nice to have another website we can use for high challenge. We've always directed our A* students to MadasMaths which I first blogged about in 2016. This week's Edexcel A Level Paper 1 had two questions that were very similar to MadasMaths questions, so clearly it's a good idea to use this website! If you're not familiar with MadasMaths, there's IYGB practice papers for maths and further maths (don't ask what IYGB stands for...!) and there are also booklets by topic. I often use questions from these booklets in my maths and further maths lessons (tip for new users: zoom in on the PDFs to see full worked solutions hiding in the booklets). 

5. Tasks 
There's been a number of new tasks and resources shared on Bluesky and Twitter in the last few weeks.

Here's a nice task from ‪@4301maths on equations of parallel lines. 

@dalechapman shared a couple of tasks: one on simultaneous equations and one on constructions.

@canning_mrmaths shared a Quadratic Graphs Venn task designed for learners to think deeply about different features of quadratic functions. The task has four variations levelling up in difficulty.

@giftedHKO shared some distance time graph questions.

And @draustinmaths.com shared some new resources for simultaneous equations.

Thank you to everyone who shares resources!

Update

We're halfway through external exam season (for my department, eight exams down and eight more to go!). This is what we've had at my school so far:

• AQA GCSE: Paper 1 was nice! I thought Paper 2 was difficult on both Foundation and Higher Tier. On Higher there was a question where students had to draw a two way table and some of them said they didn't know what that was!  Eek, there goes four marks. Yet if they'd been given a two way table to interpret or fill in the gaps they would have had no problem. So we must get them drawing more two way tables in lessons! There were two questions on Foundation requiring equating coefficients - we need to change our Foundation scheme of work to ensure this is explicitly taught in future. One paper to go!
• Edexcel A Level: Paper 1 was difficult. There were some tough questions, fiddly answers and a few questions where students would be unable to do part b without managing part a which is frustrating. Some of our students have lost a bit of confidence but hopefully Paper 2 will give all students the chance to show what they know. The Further Maths (Core Pure) papers were both ok and I'm looking forward to Further Statistics 1 this Friday (my favourite module!).
• AQA GCSE Statistics: We switched to AQA this year and our students were pleased with Paper 1. We entered Year 10 for the first time (see my post about our Option Block Experiment) - they were terrified going into the exam, but all smiles coming out! 

For 'best guess' papers please continue to check Adam Creen's dropbox which includes GCSE (maths and statistics) and A level.

My recent post aimed at Heads of Maths Tasks for the Summer Term went down well - I've had lots of emails asking for advice and resources. I'm always happy to help but bear with me at this time of year when there's so much going on at school - I will always reply within a week!

I'm looking forward to the MEI Conference next month - always one of the highlights of the year! I hope to see lots of you there. I will leave you with this fantastic present gifted to Emily Rae by a student - I love this!

Tasks for the Summer Term

I like the summer term.  

At my school Year 11 are in lessons until half term, but Year 13 went on study leave on 8th May, which means my teaching timetable has already lightened and will soon reduce further (this year I teach both Year 11 Maths and Year 11 Further Maths so I'll gain a lot of time when Year 11 leave). With all the gained hours in a day you would have thought the summer term would be relatively easy. But, surprisingly, it always feels like the busiest time of year. School work still extends into evenings and weekends in June and July in the same way it does in every other month. But, with my Head of Maths hat on, the summer term workload is distinctly different – fewer lessons to plan, but far more administrative tasks. A lot of the job becomes about preparing for the next school year.

As I’ve been Head-of-Mathsing for a good few years, I thought it might be helpful for inexperienced Heads of Maths if I share some of the things that they should be thinking about this term to make sure their department hits the ground running in September. If you’re an experienced Head of Maths then you will already have all of this on your radar, and perhaps other things I’ve missed. The idea of this post is just to give some ideas to Heads of Maths who are new to the role.

Curriculum Development
It’s a good idea to ask your team for feedback on whether your curriculum is working well. Perhaps there are times teachers feel rushed or the order of topics doesn’t quite work. Get this feedback now – if your curriculum needs a re-write it’s a big job. Also consider exams analyses from previous years. If your school’s A level or GCSE results showed underperformance in certain topics (compared to national performance) then you might need to make some changes. For example, one of the topics we were weakest on in a previous year’s GCSE was product rule for counting, so this year I’ve reviewed when we teach that and how long we give it, and I’ve done some department professional development on how to teach this topic.

If your scheme of work is working well then the only thing you need to do is adapt the timings to fit next year’s calendar. I usually need to move a couple of topics around to make things work, but changing the placement of topics has knock-on effects on resources and assessments which is a pain. The timing of the 2026 August Bank Holiday means a lot of schools are going back later than usual this September - for us, the first half of the autumn term is going to be a week shorter than it was this year, and the first half of the summer term is a week longer.  So everything still fits but some rearrangement is needed. My schemes of work look like this (each link on the schedule takes you to a topic page where a possible lesson breakdown is provided, but teachers don't have to follow this exactly - they adapt it for their classes):

I can’t do any work on curriculum timings until my leadership team confirm the dates of next year’s assessment windows (they in turn have to wait for the MAT to confirm the dates – I never understand why the MAT waits until so late in the school year to decide the following year's assessment calendar). It means I can’t do all my curriculum work until the last couple of weeks of the summer term. And it’s not just rewriting the scheme of work – website documents have to be updated too, and I need to load the curriculum for each year group onto Sparx which is a big job.

Sparx will look a bit different for our Year 11 next year - previously we’ve set normal Sparx homeworks right up until Easter but we’re going to change that. We like the new GCSE revision tool on Sparx so we're going to set that from February half term of Year 11, instead of topic-based homeworks.

Assessment Writing
We write new mid and end year assessments for Years 7 to 10 every year. This is partly to ensure students don’t get hold of the previous year’s assessments and memorise the answers. An advantage of writing new assessments every year is that we can use previous years' papers as revision material. I enjoy writing assessments, particularly searching for (or creating) novel questions to challenge students. But it’s such a huge job that it’s hard to get in done during the busier periods of the school year, so I try to make a start in the summer term where possible (I try to – but it requires a lot of focus which is hard to achieve at school, so I normally end up doing most of it in the summer holidays or October half term).

This year we wrote Year 13 mocks from scratch for the first time. Last year we used Edexcel’s secure mock papers (which are excellent) but students had clearly managed to find these online, or perhaps through tutors, so we ended up with lots of inflated predictions. It was so frustrating to waste time marking mock A level papers for students who had clearly seen the papers in advance. One boy got 100% in his mechanics mock (!) – his solutions were flawless, seemingly written by a mechanics genius – but he went on to score 62% in the mechanics paper of his actual A level exam in June... We’d had enough of all this cheating so this year we gave up on the secure mocks and instead made our own A level mock papers using questions from a variety of sources. It worked very well, so we’re making one more set. My colleague Linda will do this during her Year 13 gained time – this is an excellent use of time in the summer term.

Resource Improvements
We use warm booklets for retrieval practice at the start of our lessons, and at the end of each topic we give a test (we call these ‘snapshots’). All of these are teacher-made - sometimes they were made in a rush six years ago but get re-used every year. The summer term is a good opportunity to review and improve these resources. For example our snapshots are sometimes a bit short of space so some re-formatting is needed. Here's an example taken from one of my own Year 11 snapshots - in the top image there wasn't enough space for students to present their work clearly. The bottom image is an improvement. 

Improving the quality of shared resources is a good task to direct my team to complete after Year 11 have left. 

Subject Knowledge Development

The summer term is a good time for teachers to prepare for any new courses they're teaching next year and to develop their subject knowledge in the courses they already teach. 

The day after GCSE and A level exams have taken place I hand the spare papers out to teachers of those qualifications and expect everyone to complete the papers themselves. We become experts in the qualifications we teach when we regularly complete exam papers.

As well as completing exam papers I also hope to spend some time this term reading Colin Foster's new website bigmathematicalideas.org. 

Timetabling, Groupings and New Staff Induction
I’ve already done the class allocations for next year (i.e. deciding who will teach each year/set) and now we’re waiting for the timetabler to run it all through the system and we’ll see what comes out the other side. My hope, as always, is for minimal split classes. I have a rule that no classes of low attainers should be split between two teachers, so when the timetable comes through I’ll probably have to make some tweaks to ensure this happens (I don’t like any class being split but it's less of a concern for classes of high attainers).

We’re lucky that every year our timetable is ready for new staff induction day, which is on 29th June this year. On this day I run a department meeting after school (joined by new members of staff) where I hand out provisional timetables and set out the big picture and expectations for the next academic year. It's important that new staff go home from their induction day knowing exactly what they're teaching in September.

Another one of my big jobs in the summer term is allocating students to maths sets for next year. It’s important to get this right (particularly when it impacts GCSE tiering) so it takes time – it’s mainly spreadsheet work but I also need to get input from teachers. Our setting is based on performance in formal assessments (mid and end year) but we also take into account classwork throughout the year. I have to wait until Key Stage 3 assessment results are ready before I can get started on this job, and I have to wait for SATs results before I can start grouping the new Year 7s (these are released on 7th July but there’s always a delay getting all the UPNs we need - so this is another job that ends up being completed right at the end of term). I also get heavily involved in groupings in other subjects (careful allocation of students to bands is a key strategy for behaviour management) - all of this happens right at the end of term when there's lots of school events going on (I'm leading two Year 7 trips in the last week of term!) so it gets a bit crazy. Don't ever let anyone tell you that the summer term is quiet!

Preparation for September
There’s a lot of preparation for September that needs to be done in advance. In August I have to spend a lot of time checking papers for A level and GCSE candidates who were close to a grade boundary so I've learnt from past experience not to leave my September planning until August.

I encourage my team to start preparing their resources for September in July (as soon as they know their timetable then they can get started). This includes hole punching exercise books, printing warm up booklets and preparing first lessons. I do this for my own classes too – September Inset Day is always very busy so I know I won’t have time to plan lessons then.

There’s also stuff to prepare for September as Head of Maths – the big one is the maths department meeting on September Inset Day. This is the most important meeting of the year so I always spend a lot of time preparing it. I also need to produce and update posters and slides for my team to share with students in September – for example slides on how to use Sparx (there are new features we need to tell them about) – see my post September Routines for more on this. And of course there’s loads of housekeeping to do in the final weeks of the summer term – updating corridor displays, tidying classrooms and offices, and placing the annual ‘big stationery order’.

***

This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list of ‘things to do in the summer term’. In all schools there's a lot going on at this time of year (for us it's things like Year 6 transition interviews, Year 10 work experience calls, vast quantities of UCAS references, Open Evening, trips, induction days, assessment marking and plenty more). This is just a post about ‘things Heads of Maths should be thinking about at this time of year’, in case you’re new to the role and not sure where to start. I hope it helps!

5 Maths Gems #198

Welcome to my 198^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. GCSE Question Distribution

Thanks to Jamie Frost for producing a detailed breakdown of skills that have appeared on past GCSE papers. Other websites have analyses by topic, but Jamie has such an extensive database of past exam questions that he has been able to produce a much more granular analysis, for all exam boards and including IGCSE. 

I teach AQA at GCSE and when I teach circle theorems I always say 'alternate segment theorem seems to come up a lot in exams' - this was just a hunch, but now I know for sure - it does indeed come up a lot! Of course just because something has appeared in exams a lot in the past, it doesn't mean it will continue to do so (in fact, the opposite could be true - perhaps this year's GCSE exams will contain a lot of topics that haven't been tested in a while) so this data can't be used to make predictions. It's still interesting though. Thank you to Jamie for sharing it. 

Each skill includes a link to a randomly generated example question. Schools subscribed to Dr Frost can generate worksheets from these which can be printed or set as online tasks.

2. E2E Revision Sheets

@ThtPedagogyGeek has created a nice set of resources called E2E (Example to Exam) Revision Sheets. The idea is that you model the worked example - students copy it down and take notes, then complete the three questions. These are designed for GCSE revision.

3. Diagram Creator 

There are numerous online tools to create diagrams but I often find them unintuitive or overly complex, or they require a login. Thank you to @TickTockMaths for sharing a Geometry Tool designed for creating simple diagrams quickly. He made it so he could insert diagrams into lessons created with his Slide Creator (see Gems 197).

4. Corbett Maths Key Stage 1
Key Stage 1 teachers will be pleased to see that John Corbett has extended his popular 5-a-day range to Key Stage 1. He has made the first level (Ruby) with Emerald and Diamond to follow. 

I know that secondary teachers sometimes find these primary resources helpful too (I'm thinking of our Entry Level classes). 

5. A Level Resources

We had a difficult logs and integration question in our Year 13 mock this year that even our strongest mathematicians struggled with, so I'm pleased to see this lovely little task from ‪@mrlevmaths.bsky.social‬ for practising this specific skill.

Also thanks to ‪@karenshancock.bsky.social‬ for a resource on 'Power Equations' which is useful for Year 12 and also Year 11 L2 Further Maths students. 

Other resources on Karen's website that might be helpful for both Year 12 and L2 Certificate in Further Maths include Factorising with Surds and Graphical Solutions. Thank you Karen!

Also thanks to ‪@adamsfax.bsky.social‬ for his 'Edexcel formula sheet in a page'. We'll print these in September for all A level students to keep in the front of their book.

Big Mathematical Ideas

Colin Foster (one of the wisest men in maths education) has launched a new website: bigmathematicalideas.org. He has written a chapter on each of the five big mathematical ideas.

 

I believe this should be compulsory reading for every trainee teacher. No matter how good you are at maths when you train to be a teacher, the thing that everyone needs to develop is their pedagogical subject knowledge (not just how to do the maths, but how to explain the maths). But it's not just for trainees. I've been teaching for a long time now and I think my subject knowledge is pretty strong, but within a few minutes of reading this website I was thinking deeply about things that I haven't thought deeply about before (the big multipliers table in Section 1.5.2 had me wondering why I'd never shared this with students).

Reading this website will probably be my summer holiday project, or perhaps something I do in my gained time this term. I will use it to write next year's professional development sessions for my department.

 

Update

The first half of the summer term is very intense if you teach a lot of exam classes! I know that in some schools Year 11s have already started study leave, but I still have three weeks of lessons left with Year 11. I'm still doing topic-based revision (for example, next week we're revising surds and indices) and mixed revision (often using my revision mats). I always find that my students make masses of progress in our summer term revision lessons so I'm glad my time with them isn't cut short. If you're looking for good revision resources for Year 11, remember my GCSE Revision page has loads of hand-picked recommendations, and Adam Creen's annual 'Best Guess GCSE Dropbox' has been updated with the latest practice papers.  

I had a fantastic to response my last blog post (#mathsconf40) and to my recent conference presentation about Key Stage 3. I received dozens of emails from teachers asking for support on curriculum and assessments, including lots who said they find my gems posts helpful. Since most social media posts are now met with tumbleweed (a few likes and shares, but rarely a response), I often wonder if there's any point blogging for maths teachers these days - it's hard to tell whether anyone is listening. But after the flurry of lovely emails my enthusiasm for writing has returned, so thank you to everyone who got in touch. 💗

No doubt you saw that new research on setting in maths was published by the EEF. There are Year 7s in my school who struggle to add single digit numbers, or to multiply integers by ten, and others who find it easy to solve complex algebraic and geometric problems. Teaching these children in the same class doesn't make any sense to me, and I feel it would particularly let down the students who struggle the most and would benefit from being in a smaller group. Maths teachers are sometimes made to feel like they're evil or lazy for teaching in sets when they are actually trying to do the right thing for the students who need the most support. The narrative that schools often assign their 'worst' teachers to teach the lowest attainers is insulting nonsense. Most Heads of Maths prioritise the students who find maths difficult, and assign absolute superstars to teach them.

Here's a round up of some recent developments, in case you missed anything:

• Jonny Griffiths has updated his website carom-maths.co.uk which houses a collection of forty activities bridging from A Level Mathematics to University Mathematics. This is a great set of resources for a Sixth Form maths club. 
• Maths Genie has had a big update! Set up a free account to access useful resources, like the GCSE mini tests. 
• A few teachers have been in touch to ask about the RULER resources from Ben Tanner. These popular resources used to be available on Ben's website but it no longer exists. Helpfully, Tim Stirrup shared an archived version of the website, where you can still download the booklets.
• The QAMA is back - but this time, as an online version instead of a physical calculator. QAMA requires an estimation before it will work out an answer. It's great for developing number sense. If students don't have access to devices to use the online calculator in lessons, it could instead be used by the teacher in modelling. 
• Recently I've received a fair few emails from teachers who have either used AI to create tools for teachers or have created a platform where students can use AI to support their learning. For example, on gcsemathsai.co.uk students type in any topic or question and get instant step-by-step worked explanations. It covers the full GCSE syllabus and is free, with no account needed. One thing that stood out for me on this website is the misconceptions for each topic (e.g. look at 'common mistakes' for inequalities and arc length and sector area) which might be helpful for teachers planning lessons.
• Hannah Fry is going to be on the next Celebrity Traitors (our favourite family viewing - my daughter is obsessed with it)! Cue me telling everyone who will listen about the time Hannah bought me a drink and we hung out at BCME...

I'll leave you with these new 'squareas' puzzles from Transum. These are fun and come in multiple levels of difficulty. 

Thanks for reading!

#mathsconf40

Mathsconf40 took place in Derby yesterday. I thought it might be helpful to write a quick post to update my readers on some stuff I learnt.

I enjoyed Joe Berwick's (@berwickmaths) session on teaching statistics at A level. My degree was in Statistics at UCL (I actually did SORMS, which is similar to MORSE at Warwick - a popular course amongst our Year 13s) so I teach a lot of statistics, including FS1. Further Statistics 1 is a great choice of module for A Level Further Maths. It's particularly beneficial to students wanting to study economics at university (a popular choice) and numerous other courses. And there are many great career options for keen statisticians, such as Data Science and Actuarial Science. Our students who have studied GCSE Statistics (which they don't love) are always pleasantly surprised that they enjoy FS1. Joe also talked about the benefits of teaching FS2 - students get to learn confidence intervals which feature in many university courses. 

The majority of Joe's talk was on teaching the statistics content of A Level Maths. He talked about how the large data set includes the Great Storm of 1987 - I remember this very well (I was a very scared 6 year old living in an area with lots of big oak trees, many of which fell down). Coincidentally I'm telling my Year 12s about this tomorrow, and sharing some photos of me in the aftermath of the storm (in the first photo I'm with my mum and brother - we took these after the roads had been cleared of trees).

Joe talked about how he teaches correlation hypothesis testing first, before he teaches normal and binomial hypothesis testing. This gave me something to think about. He has very helpfully shared some of his lessons slides on berwickmaths.com. Joe made a lot of good points about things that I too have noticed - for example, that the Edexcel textbook has a single exercise on Discrete Random Variables but it comes up all the time in exams, and the questions are very different from those in the textbook (for example they include questions on the sum of two DRVs). I noticed this too and did a lesson on it with my Year 13s last week. I wasn't aware that OCR is a great place to get DRV questions for modelling and practice (see the OCR Paper 2s here - full of great questions that I can use in my Year 13 revision lessons in the next three weeks).

In the second session of the day I presented on how we engage and challenge Key Stage 3 mathematicians at my school. I think our strong GSCE results and the high uptake of our maths GCSE option (last term over one third of Year 9 students chose our course - which I blogged about here) are both down to what we do at Key Stage 3. I spoke about our curriculum, department professional development, and our assessment strategy. In particular I'm interested in research that suggests some students aren't exposed to 'novel' maths in Year 7, and I showed examples of what 'novel' might look like.

In the next session there were a number of fantastic talks on offer but I was still buzzing from running a session so I took the opportunity to have a break and catch up with my mate Dr Ed Southall. I also picked up some freebies from the exhibitors and enjoyed my bag of tuck from Rob Smith's excellent tuck shop. I learnt about the Unit Award Scheme offered by AQA which is great for schools who manage to teach students part of the L2 Further Maths course but not enough for them to enter the full exam.

Did you know that Ed is co-chair of the BCME 10 committee? BCME (British Congress of Mathematics Education) is a big research-based residential maths education conference, attended by lots of academics. I'm considering presenting at BCME this October, but only if lots of teachers attend the conference as my presentations always written for teachers. I had a great time at BCME 9 back in 2018 (blog post here) when I was lucky enough to receive a bursary. Teachers - I urge you to sign up to either speak or attend - the website is bcme.co.uk. 

After lunch I went to Matt Man's (@mr-man-maths) session on international exam papers. Matt was responsible for providing me with 'officially the most helpful bit of information I have ever picked up at a mathsconf' (see my post about mathsconf37) which was to explore different specifications on ExamWizard to find fresh banks of questions (I have recently found International A level very helpful for my Further Maths lesson planning). In Matt's session yesterday he talked about a range of qualifications and we had the opportunity to try some questions from those qualifications. 

Finally I went to Ed Southall's workshop on problem solving where he talked about what problem solving is (this will feature heavily in maths curriculum reform in the next few years). We also had a go at some different types of problems. This is part of the work Ed does at Maths Horizons which you can read about here. 

I missed Tim Dolan's (@timdolan) session on online maths tools. I often use online tools for demonstrating concepts - for example my daughter was practising for the Junior Maths Challenge last week and there was a question on rotational symmetry. She didn't know what that was so I used MathsPad's rotational symmetry tool (login required) to explain it to her. I also use a lot of animations in my teaching (gifs inserted into PowerPoints), for example when teaching constructions. I love it that Tim has collated loads of great online tools in one place on his new website mathsindex.uk. Tim invites teachers to contribute ideas for additions to the website. 

I had a nice train journey home with Megan Guinan and Jamie Frost. It was a great day overall, and it was delightful to see that there were many teachers attending mathsconf for the first time. As always, the best part was the networking, chatting about maths teaching, and catching up with old friends. Thank you to La Salle for running the conference and to City of Derby Academy for hosting it. Attendees of the conference will be able to access all the PowerPoints when La Salle shares the link in a few days. In the meantime, I'm always happy to share my schemes of work and/or assessments - just email me. See you at the next one!