As with almost all good teaching, the starting point was planning. I reviewed the class lists, investigating the pupils prior attainment (KS2 and Y7), attitudes to learning and maths strengths and weaknesses. I followed up on the “educational flags” and sought feedback on the best strategies to support key pupils. Check / done.
From there I moved onto the Key Stage 3 resource pack provided by the Head of Key Stage at our Maths meeting. I started with the mid-term plans, focusing in on our first unit of work – Whole Numbers and Decimals. Next, it was onto the textbook, teacher companion textbook and the lesson plans. Then onto designing two key questions and identifying the subject specific language I wanted to reinforce.
I planned to use the first twenty minutes meeting the pupils, setting “our” expectations for our classroom learning, our specific maths learning strategies and aspirations before making a statement of intent and moving onto our first, short, lesson aim. Sadly, I can not share that learning aim just yet, all will be revealed explained.
I had our “Do it now” task ready and as we transitioned from the class culture to the actual lesson the IWB bulb failed. The single slide with three carefully selected images that connected together and would reveal our learning goal was rendered useless. The activity rendered useless without the visual display. Our IT mayday issued, I bemoaned our luck, but with the generous enthusiasm of the pupils, we plough on, via the teachers monitor.
The images on the single slide were now too small. I quickly created a photo album in Powerpoint and rotated the images:
- A landscape Mount Everest image with cloud cover
- A wide view of an American football game paused at the snap.
- A scaled weather heat map of the UK.
The students frantically search for connections to previous maths knowledge. They were very successful connecting a single topic to a single image, however these did not hold up to further scrutiny when trying to connect the remaining two images. We moved to paired discussions… more individual connections, some very insightful, though still not connecting all three images.
I handed out a Y8 Maths book at the contents page and the pupils delved in. Better answers, more subject specific language, no less enthusiasm, barely closer to the right answer. With time quickly disappearing, I was keen to award their hard work with the answer, instead I cruelly left them hanging, with the promise of reward if they could solve the answer / connection by “tomorrow’s lesson.”