Strong foundations: how to ensure a robust and impactful KS3

“Year 11; I’m really worried about year 11; what are you doing for your year 11’s; how are you going to close the gap; why is our year 11 progress so bad”. Raise your hand if this theme has played out in your school. Everyone? I thought so… When I arrived in the classroom in…

Method Selection: Practical strategies to help students interpret problems

“The correct solution to most mathematical problems involves two steps: identify the strategy needed to solve the problem, and then successfully carry out that strategy” Roher, Dedrick and Burgess (2014) The above quote perfectly summarises the elegant simplicity and extreme complexity of maths teaching. It identifies a real blind spot in the practice of many…

The Many Uses of Fraction Multiplication

Preface In 2014, Will Emeny wrote a blog post entitled “You’ve never seen the GCSE maths curriculum like this before”. Reading it was a key moment in my development as a teacher – I began to understand why students struggled with certain topics, and that certain number skills leveraged understanding for many different topics. It…

A gateway to: Bar Modelling

This post is intended to act as an introduction/gateway to the maths teaching technique known as bar modelling. There are links to further reading at the end of the post. Apologies for representing fractions as 1/7 etc, WordPress doesn't have a fraction function as far as I can tell. Technique: Bar modelling Level: Basic (should…

A new purpose

I started a blog nine months ago full of good intentions and grand plans. Back then, I was transitioning from being a KS3 maths coordinator into the second in department, and felt that in writing about my experiences and views, I could help others in a similar position. Since then, I’ve not managed to put…