I left snowy Inverness on Monday for the conference to begin on Tuesday. Once the conference started it was full on for 4 days. I've got pages and pages of notes and I've definitely added a few things to my to do list. I want to use this blog post to record my biggest takeaways from the conference.
My absolute highlight from the conference was a lecture from Prof Berinderjeet Kaur from the National Institute of Education in Singapore titled 'How the Mastery Approach Works in Singapore. What can UK Teachers Adopt or Adapt?'. Her talk was informative and inspiring - I came out of the talk prepared to pack my bags and move to Singapore but then she said that they have a surplus of teachers (I know you read that right - a SURPLUS!!!!!). In her lecture Prof Kaur shared the framework for Maths teaching in Singapore.
Her explanation of the framework was perfection. All maths teaching rests on a base of concepts but equally significant is the skills and processes. Then the teaching is fortified by attitudes and metacognition. She did admit that the metacognition was still an area that needed development. And that the core was Mathematical Problem Solving. My absolute favourite image that Prof Kaur shared was the following image. Borrowed from a tweet from Richard Perring (@LearningMaths). What an incredible way to show the addition of integers.
Prof Kaur got her biggest reaction when she told the room that all Singapore teachers are entitled to 100 hours of CPD funded by the Ministry of Education - 100 HOURS!!!!!! Also all teaching materials and manipulatives are provided by the Ministry of Education so every school has the same resources. Imagine what an impact it would have if all schools in Scotland had exactly the same resources irrespective of catchment. I could go on more and more about this talk but I won't. I am extremely excited to talk about it with my department though.
Anyone who follows me on Twitter knows that I am a major fangirl for Craig Barton so I snapped up the chance to hear him talk alongside Andrew Taylor of the AQA with a workshop entitled 'Why exams do not tell you what students actually know'. Having listened to his podcast I had heard a lot of what he said before - however hearing it and seeing it makes a huge difference to your understanding. Craig went into significant detail on what his lessons look like and there was so much food for thought. I certainly will be sharing the Example - Problem Pairs strategy with the department now that I have had the opportunity to see what it looks like in practice.
I also grabbed the opportunity to hear Jo Morgan speak on Ideas that Transformed My Teaching. I particularly enjoyed the portion of her workshop on Methods. I have spend quite a lot of time this session looking at effective teaching strategies and methods to use with pupils to maximise understanding so it was great to hear someone talking about this as well as sharing methods she used that had not been so successful.
My final workshop was 'Investigating Mathematical Attainment & Progress' By Colin Foster and Jeremy Hodgen which was a research presentation. There were a lot of takeaways from this session. The first being that effective teaching strategies are also effective for low attaining pupils - we do not have to change our teaching. From interviews with pupils there is a desire from them for processes to be explicit or easy but once they have been shown, they really want the opportunity to do it for themselves. Also things that we assume are obvious are not obvious to our pupils but if we tell them and point it out to them and they are shown it explicitly they might actually see it and therefore be able to use it.
I learned so much over the four days. I am so going to #BCME10 and hopefully I'll have a crew of Scots to invade the conference with. Maybe we should put on a workshop?????
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