Reading in Threes (1)

I want to start a 'regular' feature on the blog - three blog posts/articles that I've read.  I don't know how frequently these posts will come but I'm hoping they will help me to write more frequently and also allow me to keep a nice record of what I've been reading.  I am also in need of a name for this series of posts.


I really liked this post from Mark Enser - The Ritual of Teaching
In this post Mark discusses some practices in classrooms, how these have become a required element of all lessons in some schools and advocates for teachers to practice in their classrooms what they know to work.



This is also a great one from Ben Newmark - Ten Principles for Great Explicit Teaching. 
Here Ben chronicles his journey to improve his teaching through explicit instruction.  This is not a maths specific post but this is definitely a post worth reading for an insight into making explicit teaching work as effectively as possible.  It has also been very kindly illustrated by Oliver Caviglioli.

I really like Tom Sherrington's blog and this post - Principles of Effective Teaching is a good one.

Tom outlines 12 principles for effective teaching and briefly explains them.  I especially like what he has to say about behaviour, teaching to the top and planning.  He references a few lists collated by other sources and then gives his own research free and driven by his gut.

Some extras:

The NCETM have just published their Secondary Mastery assessments and there are some nice questions in there.

If you haven't already you should check out the Teacher Tapp app.  

Every day at 3.30 the app notifies you to answer three questions.  The purpose of which is to gather information about teachers, their working conditions and what they spend their time doing.  As a 'reward' for answering their three questions, the app shares the results from the previous day and gives you a 'tip' which is normally in the form of a quick blog post or article to read.  I have certainly read some very enjoyable and informative posts through the app.

Some Things I'm Struggling with

This year I have a new post.  I am a Maths Development Officer based in my school.  My remit includes but is not limited to developing our new BGE course with the hopes that it seamlessly feeds into senior phase; researching, observing and sharing best practice in maths teaching; developing relationships with parents to help support pupils in maths; diagnostic assessment and intervention teaching with S1 pupils and analysing data to measure impact.  As well as those duties I am also teaching two S1 classes who are in mixed ability sets.

I have been working my way through the S1 year group performing diagnostic assessments and they have shown in video what the department and I knew was going on for some of these pupils.  Where I am really struggling is how do we ensure in a mixed ability class, where whole class teaching is the method of delivery, that we accommodate the needs of pupils who are in Early level right up to those pupils who are very secure at level 2 and ready for the challenge of level 3 (if they haven't already accessed parts of level 3)?  I'm not sure if I'm writing this post as a rhetorical and next year I'll be able to write a post and talk about the progress we made or if I'm looking for someone to give me the answer.  We do have intervention lessons in place for these pupils, so I guess the next thing I'm struggling with is how to make the best of these intervention sessions so that they have impact?  I'm not naive enough to believe intervention lessons can make up for being 3+ years behind where they should be but I need them to close that gap.

If anyone can help me, either by offering a school visit or general advice I'd love to hear from you.  I will set myself a reminder for in a years time to revisit this post and update on our progress.