your learning, your future
your learning, your future Hello and welcome to another prime edition of the Shirebrook Maths department newsletter. I would like to begin by offering my commiserations to Mr Kerfoot who was well and truly beaten during the staff Times Table Rockstars competition this lunchtime. 6 x 8 is a tricky one. The Joy of Planning As teachers we are often so pressed for time to plan so many lessons it can be difficult to actually enjoy planning lessons. However lesson planning should be fun. If you are excited when planning a lesson I think it will be more likely that the pupils will be excited taking part in the lesson. For that special person in your life this I really enjoyed reading this blog from Jo Valentine’s Day. Morgan on a lesson she enjoyed planning and delivering on tessellations. For the next edition I am going to try to write about one of my lessons in a similar way. It would be awesome if I could have a volunteer to do the same for an upcoming edition but don’t feel any obligation.
Growth Mindset One of the biggest crazes in education at the moment is the “growth mindset”. The term originates from a book called Mindset by Carol Dweck from Stanford University. In this book Dweck presents the research she carried out into what makes people successful. Her findings were (in a totally oversimplified form) that successful people in general have a growth mindset whilst less successful people have a fixed mindset. To have a growth mindset means that you believe that your ability to succeed is not fixed by factors beyond your control. You believe that the more work you put in, the more you will achieve. A fixed mindset on the other hand is the belief that it does not matter how much work you put in, the results will be the same. (Think of every time you hear someone described as “not being a Maths-person”, that is a fixed mindset.) I must point out at this point that I am yet to read Dweck’s actual book, however I have attended plenty of Teach First sessions covering this.
As with all ideas it is not without its criticisms. Here is a particularly nice set of critiques from David Didau. Nevertheless I would argue that as with much of the research in education, this is more a formalisation of what experienced teachers were already aware. If we accept Dweck’s conclusions then we should all be looking at trying to instil growth mindsets within our pupils. There are a few simple ways that it is suggested you can do this. One is to never praise someone for being smart or simply getting something correct. What should be praised is effort and the amount of work put in. This is a trap I often fall into. The website “Growth Mindset Maths” unsurprisingly has plenty to say on this matter however I am not really a fan as it appears to be using the term growth mindset to promote things such as “inquiry learning” and “mixed attainment groups” which are not necessarily related to growth mindsets. Although not explicitly concerning growth mindset I particularly liked Ben Orlin’s recent collection on, “How to Edit Math Pessimism”. As always with Ben’s work it is humorous and makes some good points. Starter of the Day I am pretty sure that everyone reading this is aware of Transum’s excellent “Starter of the Day” website however Miss Smith brought the following activity (from Feb 5th) to my attention which is a particularly nice one. (Why not have a go yourself.) It was fantastic to hear that one of Miss Smith’s pupils even asked if they could have a lesson on binary following from the discussion of this task. Challenge This stumped my little brother on the Maths Challenge this Thursday but hopefully some of us can do it.
Every day Aimee goes up an escalator on her journey to work. If she stands still, it takes her 60 seconds to travel from the bottom to the top. One day the escalator was broken so she had to walk up it. This took her 90 seconds. How many seconds would it take her to travel up the escalator if she walked up at the same spped as before while it was working?
Growth Mindset One of the biggest crazes in education at the moment is the “growth mindset”. The term originates from a book called Mindset by Carol Dweck from Stanford University. In this book Dweck presents the research she carried out into what makes people successful. Her findings were (in a totally oversimplified form) that successful people in general have a growth mindset whilst less successful people have a fixed mindset. To have a growth mindset means that you believe that your ability to succeed is not fixed by factors beyond your control. You believe that the more work you put in, the more you will achieve. A fixed mindset on the other hand is the belief that it does not matter how much work you put in, the results will be the same. (Think of every time you hear someone described as “not being a Maths-person”, that is a fixed mindset.) I must point out at this point that I am yet to read Dweck’s actual book, however I have attended plenty of Teach First sessions covering this.
As with all ideas it is not without its criticisms. Here is a particularly nice set of critiques from David Didau. Nevertheless I would argue that as with much of the research in education, this is more a formalisation of what experienced teachers were already aware. If we accept Dweck’s conclusions then we should all be looking at trying to instil growth mindsets within our pupils. There are a few simple ways that it is suggested you can do this. One is to never praise someone for being smart or simply getting something correct. What should be praised is effort and the amount of work put in. This is a trap I often fall into. The website “Growth Mindset Maths” unsurprisingly has plenty to say on this matter however I am not really a fan as it appears to be using the term growth mindset to promote things such as “inquiry learning” and “mixed attainment groups” which are not necessarily related to growth mindsets. Although not explicitly concerning growth mindset I particularly liked Ben Orlin’s recent collection on, “How to Edit Math Pessimism”. As always with Ben’s work it is humorous and makes some good points. Starter of the Day I am pretty sure that everyone reading this is aware of Transum’s excellent “Starter of the Day” website however Miss Smith brought the following activity (from Feb 5th) to my attention which is a particularly nice one. (Why not have a go yourself.) It was fantastic to hear that one of Miss Smith’s pupils even asked if they could have a lesson on binary following from the discussion of this task. Challenge This stumped my little brother on the Maths Challenge this Thursday but hopefully some of us can do it.
Every day Aimee goes up an escalator on her journey to work. If she stands still, it takes her 60 seconds to travel from the bottom to the top. One day the escalator was broken so she had to walk up it. This took her 90 seconds. How many seconds would it take her to travel up the escalator if she walked up at the same spped as before while it was working?
