Working forwards...
These puzzles are useful as a starter or quick introductory activity for expanding standard quadratic expressions.

Picking apart and reworking my lessons from last year, I noticed that I almost exclusively model worked examples by handwriting "live" rather than pre-typing. I don't recall making a conscious decision to do this, but following a discussion with my husband this weekend about print vs digital media, I thought I'd think more critically whether either style has any considerable advantage.

There are some interesting studies about reading information via print or digital media; this paper from the Research in Learning Technology journal looks specifically at educational materials and this article from Phys.org summarises some of the preferences people have for different media - generally, we prefer printed media for longer, more involved reads and digital media for shorter reads. I also found this study examining handwriting vs typing inputs for students when solving equations; the authors conclude that the only real difference in this scenario is the speed at which students completed the task, with typesetting algebra taking twice as long as handwriting solutions. However, I've not been able to find anything on the modelling of worked examples in Maths, so this blog post is written with the caveat that this is all personal theorising and is not research-based.

In two weeks I'm returning to work after pretty much a year off on maternity leave. I had such plans - I was finally going to sort out my website, blog more, organise the stupid pile of resources on my memory stick, finish my #mathsconf blogs from 2017 (16, 15, ...) - the list goes on. These plans were made in the naivety of late pregnancy, when I'd decided that I had loads of time off and a sleeping baby would be dead easy to work around.

Unfortunately, they aren't, and I'd also seriously underestimated my need for a little bit of self-care time - the last thing I wanted to do once I'd got my daughter down for a nap was turn my computer on and start working - so none of my plans actually came to fruition. 

However, I did manage to finish the book I'd been working on for the Tarquin A Level course and resources (shameless plug but I'm so proud that I finally achieved what I thought was a complete pipe dream of becoming an author - although I have to confess in my head I was the next JK Rowling, not writing maths revision guides). I also wrote a guest post for TeachWire in 45 minute spurts during naps, so I'm not entirely convinced it's any good. Over the last couple of weeks I've made some attempt at deleting some old rubbish resources and trying to plan my first few lessons, but I'm aware that returning to work with a 9-month old (albeit part-time) will involve some serious expectation management on my part. Fortunately, over the last nine months I've become much more accustomed to "that'll do", and my plans for this academic year involve a significant amount of "work smarter, not harder".

When I sat down to write this post, I discovered a prompt saved in my drafts from two years ago titled "Stop, Start, Continue, Change", with nothing other than headers. Presumably that was a thing that was going round the blogosphere at the time, so I decided better late than never - so here's my Stop Start Continue Change for academic year 2018-19.

Homework generates a significant amount of my marking load, and I'm not sure it's always entirely effective. My homeworks are generally a set of problems similar to those worked on in class, giving pupils an opportunity for further practise and for me to identify individual misconceptions when marking their work. The trouble with this is that by the time the homework comes back in, is marked and returned with feedback, a week has passed (due to peculiarities in our timetable, we only see classes once a week) and the feedback becomes less effective as the immediacy is lost.

A few years ago I experimented with flipped learning with one GCSE group, to great effect. I'm keen to look at this again this year, perhaps using our MathsWatch subscription to create tasks to revise prior knowledge before beginning a new unit. I also want to look at more effective strategies for revision homework, short of "there's a test next week, revise" - as we're all aware, that's a week off for some pupils!

I admit it, I love a well-formatted resource. Unfortunately, this can occasionally border on obsession, with a tendency for reformatting other people's resources to fit my "style", and also reformatting all of mine every three or four years when I change whatever style I've picked, not to mention dealing with the whole Promethean/Smartbook/PowerPoint choice. This will definitely be stopping this year - I'm not sure how many weeks of my life I've wasted on this pointless task, but it adds next to nothing to pedagogy or pupil engagement, and I don't have the time to burn anymore. However, I will be making sure anything that I make new is in a consistent style with what I've already got and sticking with it!

This is a bit of a cheat, really - I'm not sure you can consider one blog post a proper return, but I am going to attempt to keep up with blogging and updating this very neglected site this year. I've got a few ideas bouncing around already, and I'm sure the challenges of working part-time and balancing childcare and my career will give me plenty to write about. A fortnightly blog or update sounds manageable, particularly if I keep it short and simple (unfortunately not my forte), so I'll be giving that a go!

At the weekend I read Mark McCourt's latest blog in his series on Mastery - of particular interest as I spent ages working on what I thought was an effective "Mastery curriculum" in my previous role. It's the only bit of CPD I've done this year, but it really is an excellently written piece (I almost want to say manifesto). The bit that struck a real chord with me was titled "Moving from Current Practice to Mastery Approach" and examines the pattern of a typical lesson compared with a suggested mastery approach. I'm not going to attempt to paraphrase too far, as it really does need to be read in full - but the gist is that more time is spend on impactful teacher direction, perhaps interspersed with pupils trying examples for themselves, and questioning is planned carefully at each stage.

There is also an interesting discussion about problem-solving - or as Mark titles it, "behaving mathematically" in the section "Phasing Teaching". My biggest takeaway from this was that pupils should not be asked to behave mathematically with content that they have just encountered, as they need time for this knowledge to mature in order to work flexibly with it; instead, pupils should work on problems linked to these topics but relying on earlier learning. As I've already decided that one of my performance management targets is to make use of open-ended or rich problems more effectively, I'll be considering some of these points when planning tasks.

#MathsConf13 took place last Saturday, and as usual, was another fantastic day of cheap CPD. Sadly, I missed the London conference in the summer, so I was really looking forward to this one. It definitely didn't disappoint, despite being a bit of a struggle at nearly 8 months pregnant!

One highlight of the day was the keynote from Matt Parker; I have to confess to spending the first few minutes wondering why this bloke looked so familiar until I realised that I'd seen him in the superb Numberphile videos.  He was highly entertaining, but also gave a few decent ideas for use in the classroom, such as thinking about images as RGB spreadsheets and creating a mega-Menger sponge or a fractal Christmas tree.

My three speed-dates were as follows:

• Catching up with a colleague from my old school - I know, this isn't really what speed dating is for, but we did have a good chat about their decisions regarding GCSEs and A Levels!
• Paul (@PaulRodrigo2718 ), who showed me his method for scaffolding problem-solving questions at GCSE.
• Richard (@TickTockMaths), who shared the absolutely superb dudamath.com, which I'd not seen before but has so much going on that its potential for use in the classroom seems massive.

Rather than attempting to blog about each workshop (I still haven't finished my #mathsconf7 round-up - now unlikely to ever happen!), I decided to make the most of my time off by doing a bit of relaxing colouring-in - so this conference's workshop posts are in "visual blog" format. I attended:

1. Making Maths Work in Science with Luke Graham (@BetterMaths);
2. Another Two Topics in A Level Mathematics with Tom Bennison (@DrBennison) and Ed Hall (@TarquinAlevel);
3. Things to Do With your Large Data Set with Stella Dudzic;
4. Problem Solving - Getting to Grips with the Overarching Theme 2 in the New Maths A-level with Dan Rogan.

The Prezi from the session and links to all of the applets and resources mentioned can be found on Tom's blog post.

Session 2 at #MathsConf7 was delivered by Christine Andrews, Andrew Taylor and Gary Wing, and looked at the developments and questions about the new Maths A Level for AQA. This blog is just my interpretation of their workshop, and shouldn't be taken as gospel, although I've tried to reproduce accurately what was said. It's also worth remembering that these materials are still in draft form, and have not been accredited by Ofqual yet.

The session looked at many more than the titular 10 issues, and provided a lot of food for thought - I'm looking forward to teaching the new A Level, but it will be hard to mentally move away from the modular system.

Teaching and examining using the "large data set"
Many of the Statistics questions will now be based on a "large data set"; AQA have chosen Family Food, which is published by the Office for National Statistics every December. Christine clarified that this selection would not change through the lifetime of the specification, but that the updated version would be used every year, and examination questions would be set using the most recent set of data; I took this to mean that exams in summer 2018 would use data published at the end of 2016. Christine also highlighted that teaching using the data set would not be compulsory, but that familiarity with the scenarios and language used would be advantageous in an exam situation (see example below: Paper 2, Q14 from the AS Level papers, available here). This approach would certainly make the teaching of statistics more coherent, and give lots of time for real in-depth analysis of one problem, as opposed to skimming over the surface of many different scenarios. Gary highlighted the opportunities to investigate these data further using technology such as Excel and MatLab.

Peter Mattock's session at #mathsconf5 (Concrete Approaches to Abstract Mathematics) was great and gave me a lot of takeaways, so signing up for this one as my first session seemed like a no-brainer. I wasn't disappointed; this time, Peter looked in depth at fifteen topics that can lead to misleading assumptions by pupils, and challenged us to come up with examples that "broke the mould".

We started with a little game; Peter asked us to come up with examples we could use to teach particular topics, such as a solvable linear equation or a diagram for teaching parallel line properties. I could sort-of see where this was going, but I decided to embrace the task as it was designed and go for my first idea for each example. We were then awarded points for the predictability of our answers - I scored a whopping 17/20 on my first go with some completely textbook examples. Peter then asked us to improve these examples to come up with a problem set that would score zero. I've neatened up (but not censored!) and scanned my notes below, with the original example on the left and improved examples on the right.

As I promised my first #mathsconf7 blog before the en d of Monday, I thought I'd better crack on, which means turning pages of tiny scribbled notes on an old Osiris pad into something a little more coherent.

Much like @taylorda01, I've spent a lot of time in Leeds over the last decade (three years of university, followed by two years travelling up and down nearly every weekend, followed by a further five years living there and working in Yorkshire) and have never been to the Royal Armouries, but I concur with him that it worked well as a venue, and the unrelated event going on in the Leeds Dock area certainly added a bit of a party atmosphere every time I walked from New Dock Hall to the main Armouries building.

While the Internet is possibly the best thing that's happened to teaching and education in the last thirty years (think TES resources, Twitter, independent sites, quick communication channels), it also comes with a minefield of copyright issues. A couple of weeks before I left my last job, an email went round to all staff reminding them of copyright issues with downloading and using images from the Internet - and I used to be as guilty of this as the next person. When planning a lesson, it's very easy to just Google and pull in an image from anywhere to jazz up a PowerPoint - accessing images from all over the world means that you can easily illustrate a point about real-life applications of the mathematics pupils are studying. However, with the prevalence of online resource sharing, it's more important than ever to make sure that images used and redistributed are actually done so legally.

So the restaurant I'm at has red and green cards,  but no amber...

Yeah, tonight's is a bit of a placeholder post, as I've been busy, followed by asleep (post-half term lurgy), followed by actually out of the house for a friend's birthday meal.
​
Sometimes switching off is the best thing to do! I'll make the last three posts particularly good to make up!