Posts tagged ‘maths’

Supporting Student’s Revision

I ‘attended’ #TMMathsIcons on Saturday (a superb event), and contributed a short presentation on support student’s revision. Attached are my slides and the margin prompts mentioned.

The presentation was about what strategies we have used to support student’s revision, such as explaining about the testing effect from the Roediger and Karpicke (2006a) study, a very non-expert overview of working memory, long term memory and retrieval and quotes (which someone else had previously shared, but awfully, I can’t remember who) about retrieval. We then shared a range of strategies with the students that they can use, strategies that we also use in the classroom, all the time reminding students to keep testing themselves.

The second part of the presentation is about the area of revision that I think I’ve neglected – strategies for selection of methods. To support students in this, we modelled close reading of the question, something I’d been introduced to on a course about the reading challenges of GCSEs. We also used margin prompts, as described by Jacob Wilson, in his Learning to Learn article in the May 2018 Impact, which we break down the phrases “what do you know?” and “what can you do?”, or as Andy Lyons @MrLyonsMaths describes it, “state the obvious, apply the obvious”. I briefly mention in Alevel we look for the trigger words which should trigger knowledge and connections.

Presentation for Maths Learning

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Being an avid reader of @mathsjem’s resourceaholic blog, especially her maths gems, I’m often inspired to try something out.  This time, from gems 30, was the homework expectations. I still get frustrated by pupils lack of presentation skills, despite reminding them of our school’s presentation for learning rules (which are in a bullet point list).  It’s not just following the rules, but the attitude it reflects in their learning, and therefore the expectation of achievement they give themselves.  I hope that if I expect excellence, then pupils can achieve excellence!

So for me to expect excellence in their presentation, I don’t just want a list of rules, but a model to what excellence looks like.  I will start trialling using this model in the next few weeks (with a tweak or two to the design and colours) with the aim of launching it with my classes in September, and a focus on presentation for learning in those first few lessons and home learning.

Presentation for Maths Learning

2nd August: Attached below now is the updated version, which includes presentation target codes for the pupils, as presented by @letsgetmathing at mathsconf4.

Presentation for Maths Learning

Presentation for maths learning