A Level Resources #2

This is my second post about my #mathsconf5 workshop. In my previous post I shared some of my favourite A level resources. In this post I'm covering the other key points from my workshop:
1. The demand for resources.
2. Using problems sets.
3. Getting organised (including schemes of work).
I also discuss how to share additional resources with students, which I didn't have time to cover at the conference.

I just want to clarify something before I start - resources are helpful, but in my mind there is nothing more important than clarity of explanation. Good A level teachers have sound subject knowledge and know how to explain things well. Please don't think that my focus on resources at the conference suggests that I think that resources take precedence! They don't. They're nice to have though.

Is the textbook enough? 
I started my workshop by discussing the demand for A level resources. I often use A level textbook exercises for practice in class, but do I need anything else?

To answer that question let's look at my typical lesson structure. I don't do anything revolutionary in my A level teaching - no flipped learning, no inquiry - my style is fairly traditional. I'm not saying this is the best way to teach A level, it's just the way I teach.

In the structure above you can see that I normally start with a skills check and refresher (sometimes an exam question relating to what we did in the last lesson, sometimes a short puzzle or activity), so I need resources at this point. I'll then teach something new and my students will practise that new skill (again, I'll need resources here - a textbook, worksheet or activity). Formative assessment of skills during this activity will help me determine which students need more explanation. Imagine the class splitting into two groups at this point - those who've demonstrated understanding and are developing fluency, and those who need more support (I might need some differentiated activities here). After the lesson I need to do some summative assessment, so I might set a homework which I will take in and mark, or I might assess students in a test on a later date - again, I need resources for these assessment activities. Finally, I tell my students to do ongoing independent practice and I need to point them in the direction of resources for this. So you can see that there are many opportunities to use a variety of resources throughout the lesson. The textbook does not cover all these bases. Thankfully there's loads of brilliant A level resources available - read my previous post for ideas.

In my workshop I shared three activities from MEI and asked delegates to discuss whether they'd use these, and how they could use them. For example I often use the first activity below (Logs True or False by Susan Wall) as a quick refresher (ie a starter), but it also works well for formative assessment (perhaps with mini-whiteboards) and/or basic skills practice.

The coordinate geometry resource above works well in a consolidation lesson - students draw their working diagram in the middle of A3 paper and stick each task (and their answers) around the edge in the order they completed the tasks. The idea is to get them thinking about the information they need to answer each question.

Problem sets
Time is a huge problem in A level teaching. At my previous school we had 8 lessons a fortnight (split 5/3 between two teachers) in both Year 12 and Year 13. This simply was not enough time to teach three modules. I was always rushing through topics and often stressed about running out of time. At my new school we get more time (10 lessons a fortnight in Year 12 and 9 lessons a fortnight in Year 13) - this is much better, though I still feel some time pressure. I'd love to spend time on problem solving but 'getting through the exam specification' takes priority. For the odd occasion when I do get the opportunity to do some problem solving with my students, I've collated a number of problems sets (suitable for GCSE and AS level):

• Pythagoras -> PowerPoint // PDF
• Indices -> PowerPoint // PDF
• Surds -> PowerPoint // PDF
• Quadratics -> PowerPoint // PDF
• Equation of a circle -> PowerPoint // PDF

I got the problems from various sources (information listed in the PowerPoints). I normally print the PDFs on A3 paper and get students to work with a partner to solve the problems in any order.

Getting organised
When I was Key Stage 5 Coordinator I went into school during the summer holidays and spent a day downloading and organising hundreds of A level resources. This saves everyone a lot of time and effort during term time. I organised these resources by topic on the school network and added them to my school's A level Schemes of Work. I've moved schools now but took all the files with me (attendees at my conference session were given my extensive C1/C2 resource files as a thank you for coming!).

Extract from C2 Scheme of Work

Some schools don't use schemes of work for A level. It's not a necessity like it is at Key Stage 3 and GCSE. I was lucky that we had excellent schemes of work at my previous school which contained lots of links to resources - these were set up and regularly updated by my colleagues.

At the end of my workshop a delegate asked if I'd share these schemes of work and I promised I would, so here's C1 - C4 for you to borrow and edit. None of the hyperlinks will work in these documents because they were linked to the school network, not the internet, but at least it's a starting point for the structure.

Incidentally, if I were starting a resource collection from scratch then I'd consider using Pinterest or Pealrtrees to hold my collection because I love the 'snapshot' format.

Sharing resources with students

Consider setting up a blog or Twitter account for your students - take students to an IT Room and get them to follow the account or register for email updates to ensure you get an audience. Publish essential information (eg assessment dates, homework deadlines) and give access to resources, tips, enrichment and so on. In the year that I was Key Stage 5 Coordinator, I wrote a Sixth Form Maths Blog - it has been abandoned now I've left the school, which is a shame because I was really proud of it. It was a great way to encourage independent learning and to give students opportunities to improve. Below is an example post so you can see how I shared resources with students. If you want to see an example Twitter account for students, look at @MathsNewVic.

So that's it! I hope these two posts have helped you in creating or enhancing your collection of A level resources. If you attended my workshop I hope you found it useful. Please comment below to share anything good that I've missed - I'd love to see your favourite resources and hear about what you do.

#mathsconf5

Yesterday La Salle Education held their fifth National Maths Teacher Conference. I didn't attend the first one (I was very new to Twitter at the time) but I've attended the last four conferences and have really enjoyed them all. I love learning more about maths teaching - I always go back to school feeling inspired and full of fresh ideas.

This time the conference was held at Ponds Forge in Sheffield. The venue was a bit rough around the edges and it was a shame that there was no technical support available for presenters, but Sheffield is always a pleasure to visit. I travelled up after school on Friday, spending my long train journey marking terrible S1 homeworks (note to self: teach standard deviation again!). At Doncaster I bumped into another Jo (the lovely @JoLocke1) - it was nice to have a companion for the rest of the journey. Following a brief stop at the hotel we went to the pre-conference drinks at All Bar One. It was really nice to relax and talk to people with mutual interests - I enjoyed chatting about maths teaching with tweeps including (pictured below) @suzekward, @Ms_Kmp, @MoreThanMaths and @MsSteel_Maths.

In the morning I walked over to the conference with Jo Gledhill (the fellow Lead Practitioner I'd met on my way to Sheffield), Charmayne Bailey (also a Lead Practitioner, just back from Shanghai) and Mo Ladak (AST and author of the brilliant website MathedUp!). What fantastic people - I couldn't have asked for better company. On arrival I spotted not-so-grumpy Ed Southall (of solvemymaths.com - creator of the Maths Mr Men) - he kindly bought me a bacon sandwich and told me about the book he's writing, which is going to be absolutely essential reading for maths teachers.

I'm now going to share my thoughts on the three workshops I attended - I'm not a great note taker so these are not detailed accounts, just a few highlights.

New GCSE - Andrew Taylor and Craig Barton

This workshop left me slightly terrified about the new GCSE! I love Craig's work but I've never seen him present before. He is a highly entertaining and engaging presenter and I very much enjoyed listening to his thoughts and insights. I'm quite familiar with the new GCSE content - I've complied a whole page full of resources for the new topics - but taking another look at sample exam questions, with Craig's commentary, was incredibly helpful. My immediate thoughts were:

• The new content on Foundation - for example trigonometry and quadratics - is simply not suitable for this tier. The inclusion of these new topics seems to totally negate the point of a two-tier GCSE. This kind of nonsense makes me cross. 
• In my opinion our maths curriculum is far too broad at Key Stage 4 (for both tiers) - instead of including new topics, topics should have been removed so we can cover the important stuff in more depth. The government is desperate to improve our international maths rankings, but I believe that what we teach is a bigger problem than how we teach - and in my opinion the new GCSE has gone in the wrong direction.
• The new GCSE will include familiar topics in non-routine questions. I like the style of the new GCSE questions very much but they will certainly present a big challenge for most students. The examples Craig showed clearly demonstrated this. We have our work cut out! 

Craig announced a new resource from AQA and diagnosticquestions.com which I'm sure will prove very helpful.  Here you will find a collection of multiple choice quizzes in the style of new GCSE questions (more coming soon). As there's a Foundation and Higher version for each topic, Craig suggested using the Foundation tests as a baseline, then teaching the content, then using the Higher tests to assess progress. An example question is shown below.

As I've said, I don't make great notes at conferences - but I was sitting next to Ed during this session and, as you can see, his notes are crystal clear... Yes, that's a sheep.

Paper Maths - Jenny Steel
Pink-haired Jenny is fabulous, and I knew exactly what to expect from her workshop - lots of time to play with paper, interspersed with teaching ideas. It was really fun and there was a lovely atmosphere in the room. I'm not great with this kind of thing (I've never had any success whatsoever with origami) but foldables (which are big in America) are definitely something I can manage.

Check out Jenny's blog for lots more about this. She's planning to set up a website for sharing foldables too.

During this workshop I was very lucky to sit next to Kim (@Ms_Kmp) who writes the wonderful website mathssandpit.co.uk - she's very creative and was showing me all sorts of fantastic paper maths. Here's my table enjoying themselves:

Thanks to Suzanne Gardner for showing me a clever trick for making a quick revision booklet. And Ed (@solvemymaths) told us how to revitalise glue sticks - put a drop of water in the lid, put the lid on and leave it upside down overnight. 

Overall this was a great workshop - thanks very much to Jenny for organising it.

Shanghai - Bruno Reddy, Craig Jeavons, Matt Fox

With three presenters just back from Shanghai, I knew there'd be a lot to learn here. I enjoyed this session very much. As well as all the myth busting (most strikingly, the child sleeping at the back of a classroom), plenty of transferable teaching ideas were shared in this session. Craig has blogged about it here - slides and notes will be available soon so these ideas can be shared more widely. 

We looked at how indices are taught, including the progression of questions which was fascinating. We also looked at translation (that's slide/glide to my non-UK readers) - I love the way the topic is introduced using videos and pictures, followed by very clear, well structured explanations.

Narrative plays a big part in maths lessons in Shanghai - I wrote about the benefits of teaching through storytelling in my post about High Expectations.

Picture by @DrBennison

Overall this was an excellent session - I liked hearing about maths teaching in Shanghai from three different perspectives and the content gave me a lot to think about.

I was pleased with all my workshop choices. I'm getting better at picking the right sessions - those that contain original ideas or helpful insights and are directly relevant to my role or cover an area of interest to me. I was very sad to miss Kris Bolton's workshop on the Stories of Maths, but Tom Bennison came to the rescue and filmed the whole talk (video here) - hurrah!

I hope that people who attended my workshop on A level resources found it to be content-rich and well structured - any feedback is welcome. I wish I'd had more time so that delegates could have a go at more of the activities I shared. But I did my best to cover as much as I could in 50 minutes and I hope people found it helpful. I've written all about my workshop here for those who didn't attend.

A Susan Wall activity from my workshop

TweetUp

Julia Smith (@tessmaths) did a brilliant job of organising the TweetUp at lunchtime. I was in charge of the photobooth - thank you to all who posed for a photo.

Cakes and Gifts 

Huge thanks to Andrew Paget, Julia Smith and Rob Smith for the gifts - such generous people. Thanks also to Luke Graham for inviting me to get involved in his GCSE collaboration session which I'm sure he'll blog about soon. 

Apologies for not mentioning everyone who I spoke to - it really was lovely to meet new people, and to see people again who I've met at previous conferences.

I always love the cake competition - the inside of the Rubik's Cube cake was particularly impressive! All the cakes were awesome, but I was pleased to see the circle theorem cakes win the prize - check out the tiny tangents.

Overall it was a great day - I met many many lovely people, talked a lot about maths teaching, felt inspired, and survived my workshop in one piece (phew!). Thanks to La Salle for another brilliant conference. See you all at the next one.

#mathsconf5 in action - picture by @dmg_13

A Level Resources

At #mathsconf5 I delivered a workshop entitled 'Resources for Teaching Maths at AS Level'. I thought it might be helpful to share highlights from that presentation here. I'm going to split my ideas into two separate posts - in today's post I'll list recommended sources of A level resources. In my next post I'll discuss some ideas on how to structure A level lessons, how to use resources and how to organise and share resources.

Here's the slides and handout from my conference session.

My Top 10
In my workshop I talked through my favourite sources of A level resources. I narrowed it down to ten, but there were many more I wanted to include.

1. Solomon Worksheets
I tend to use extracts from Solomon worksheets for starters, plenaries or extension work. For example, if I've taught quadratic inequalities then the question below makes a nice starter question in the next lesson:

Solomon worksheets come with very clear worked solutions so you could also give these worksheets to students for independent practice at home. It's not helpful when teachers tell their students to do ongoing independent study but don't provide (or point them in the direction of) suitable practice questions.

You probably have these worksheets on your network at school, if not then they can be purchased here.

2. Activities from Susan Wall
Susan Wall is considered the queen of rich tasks at A Level. Some of her resources are on Integral, which I'll talk about in a minute - but another good way to find her material is to search for 'Susan Wall' in the National STEM Centre eLibrary.

Have a go at the question below. It may only take you a minute, but it's an excellent question for students who find this notation tricky (plus anything that involves graph sketching is worthwhile).

I also love Susan Wall's integration activity below. Again, this is great for getting students to think rather than just follow procedures.

3. Integral
Every school should have a subscription to integralmaths.org. Provided by the MEI and FMSP, it's an extensive collection of notes, activities, worksheets and assessments for every A level module and exam board. The indices maze below is just one example of MEI/FMSP material - there's a huge variety of resources on Integral so it's worth spending a day in the holidays exploring.

This guide provides detailed information about the content of Integral. Another example of an Integral activity is shown below. I love this activity!

4. TES - SRWhitehouse

There's loads of A level resources on TES - my favourite contributor is Susan Whitehouse. I use her resources in almost every lesson. I find her materials particularly useful when teaching C3 and C4 - you'll find lots of links to these in my A2 resources library.

Her indices activity (extract below) is excellent. I expect that most people use this when teaching indices at A level or GCSE, but it also makes a helpful starter in a lesson on differentiating expressions with negative and fractions indices. Question 6 and 7 below often cause confusion for students - they want to write both as 2x^-3.

The logs activity shown below is another example of a Susan Whitehouse activity that I use regularly.

5. Teachit Maths
Teachit Maths is a great website for Key Stage 3 and GCSE. PDF resources are available for free. Their collection of Key Stage 5 resources is growing. I don't often use card-based activities but I do like their log dominoes. I've used them before and they worked well.

I like this Pairs of Lines activity too - it would work in both a Higher GCSE lesson and in an AS coordinate geometry lesson.

6. Mathematics Assessment Project
The materials of the Mathematics Assessment Project (which is part of Shell Centre) remind me of the Standards Unit materials (more on that in a minute). They provide well-designed tasks for formative and summative assessment. Although these materials are designed for the US curriculum, there's plenty of excellent resources for Key Stage 3, 4 and 5. There's two lessons that I particularly like: Sorting Equations of Circles 1 and Sorting Equations of Circles 2. I often use the 'Going round in circles' poster task (solution shown below). I use this when I've just taught students the equation of a circle - instead of giving them a textbook exercise, I give them this grid on A3 paper. Working in pairs, they have to place various equations of circles on the grid.

The second circles lesson is also full of excellent tasks - an extract is shown below.

7. CMEP
We're very lucky that the Cambridge Mathematics Enhancement Project - an initiative to develop A level resources - is currently producing loads of fantastic new material. If you want to access these resources while they're still under development then you'll need to register with CMEP (although some materials are currently available through NRICH). It won't be long though until the full collection of CMEP resources are made available to all. Some of their materials are enrichment problems for high attainers, but there's also fluency exercises and scaffolded tasks. For example I like this 'Logarithm lattice':

and this 'Integral chasing' activity:

8. Don Steward
I can't talk about resources without recommending my hero Don Steward. His blog (Median) contains rich tasks for 11 - 16 year olds, but many of his higher end GCSE resources are suitable for A level too. Topics include algebra, quadratics, trigonometry, sequences, surds, indices, cubics, graph transformations and coordinate geometry. An example is his activity 'geometric series, some with surds' which was designed for the new GCSE but is suitable for C2 (Edexcel).

I've already blogged about his 'one incorrect simplification' tasks which worked brilliantly on Year 12 induction day.

And here's another typical Don Steward task - this one is on cubics:

9. The Standards Unit
We all know and love the "Improving Learning in Mathematics" (or Standards Units) resources. There's a good selection for A level that are well worth exploring. In the past I've always gone straight for the resources at the back, but recently I've discovered that the lesson ideas and questioning prompts are also incredibly helpful.  Here's an example from Matching Functions and Derivatives:

10. Resourceaholic and #mathsTLP
The libraries at resourceaholic.com contain hundreds of links to hand-picked A level resources. My AS Core library is always the first place I check when planning a C1 or C2 lesson. Resources are grouped by topic. The extract below is from a 'Fun Sheet' (I can't find a copy of the original book it came from) - it's a lovely activity for simplifying simple trigonometric expressions before meeting trigonometric identities.

On my blog you'll also find lots of posts about A level teaching such as Introducing Differentiation, Algebraic Division, Radians, Logs and Factorising Harder Quadratics. I often feature A level ideas in my Gems posts too - here's one from John Smith.

Finally, #mathsTLP is every Sunday evening 7pm - 8pm. This is a Twitter chat in which lesson ideas and resources are shared. Join in to ask for help or offer ideas. This is the sort of thing you might tweet:

More sources
I used to think that there weren't many A level resources around, but it turns out there's plenty out there. Every school needs a hard working Key Stage 5 Coordinator to come into school during the holidays and spend a day or two downloading and organising resources! I'll say more about this in my next post.

There were lots of websites that I didn't mention in the list above that should definitely be on your radar. If I'd had longer than 50 minutes for my workshop, I'd have included the websites listed below (and many more!):

• MathedUp! - lots of excellent A level links including activities, PowerPoints and videos.
• m4ths.com - among other things, this website has a range of A level worksheets by topic. Check out this brilliant C1 and C2 Workbook.
• Colmanweb - absolutely tonnes of excellent A level resources.
• Maths Sandpit - posts tagged A level contain lovely lesson ideas and resources.
• MathsPad - brilliant resources, including plenty for A level (some free, some subscription).
• StudyWell - nicely presented past exam questions by topic, with answers.
• TheChalkface.net - nice range of activities, investigations and presentations. 
• Mr Barton Maths - great library of A level resources
• RISPs - rich starting points - a collection of open-ended investigative activities

Please comment below to let me know what else you'd recommend.

I hope this post has been helpful if you're new to teaching A level or an experienced teacher looking for fresh inspiration. My next post will feature more ideas for teaching A level maths.