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.

I've spent quite a bit of time so far over half term working on the resource areas of my site - one topic I was keen to get a few more resources for was writing algebraic expressions and using correct algebraic notation, as I'm teaching this to Year 7 after half term and my collection was looking a little sparse. 

Today I'd also found a link to the Cuisenaire Rods manipulative on the NRich site, which is absolutely fantastic. I remember discovering a dusty old box of rods in the resource cupboard during my NQT year, digging them out and then not really doing anything relevant with them because I didn't have a) the time or b) the experience to work out how to use them without just confusing the pupils more. I'd always been determined to go back and check them out properly though, particularly with the links to the work I've been doing with algebra tiles. ​

A look at my new teaching and learning toy

First Complete Mathematics conference of the academic year - the best yet?

I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about the importance of trust, so I thought I'd follow that up today with another tip for NQTs. It's something I need to keep working on myself, although I am getting better - last academic year, I hit the Autumn term exhaustion wall about three weeks before Christmas, as opposed to a week after October half term.

I'll admit to having to cheat a little bit on this challenge; this post is one of the few I had to write ahead of time and schedule to post later. I have a good excuse - I'm getting married today, and I imagine that, even though my fiance is very understanding about the amount of time and energy I put into teaching, even he would object if I blogged during our wedding day.

​While I've been organising over the summer, I realised that my resource collection has grown exponentially again this year. I made the move to storing resources electronically this year, which has meant I'm drowning in far fewer bits of paper and it's much easier to find the worksheet I want than rifling through folders. Despite this, I still have my entire cupboard under the stairs full of bits and pieces that need transferring or updating - I think it's going to be an endless task.

Finding, developing and trying new resources is one of my favourite parts of teaching, which is one of the reasons I started the resources pages on my site - it's far easier to link to a page at home, then find that again at school, rather than email things to myself, which I then forget about the following year. As above, this project is still unfinished, but I hope to put a big dent in it over the next few weeks. But what makes a good resource?

Starters can be a contentious issue; the term "starter" is a hangover from the days of three-part lessons in bite-size chunks, which seem to have fallen from vogue now. However, they are still a key part of my teaching, and today's SBPC looks at why.

In my mind, my lesson "starters" fall into three categories, and they're not mutually exclusive. Sometimes it's appropriate to have a couple of "starter" activities (I'm dropping the quote marks now because I'm irritating myself). I once had a lesson starter that went on for the entire lesson, as it became painfully apparent that the class had completely forgotten to solve simultaneous equations, so my quick prior knowledge check turned into an off-the-cuff revision session.

At the most recent Maths Conference in London, I spent one session sitting at a table with three NQTs, and was asked by one of them what my "top tips" were for surviving their NQT year. For a bit of context, I've now been teaching for six years if you include my GTP year, which I do, as I was thrown in the deep end with my own classes and found that year very challenging. As a result, I found my NQT year relatively straightforward, as I wasn't in the position that many new teachers are: suddenly having to take on sole responsibility for the classes in front of me.

It still baffles me a little bit that people would ask me for advice, as I still consider myself a fairly "new" teacher, but I did my best with a few bits of advice. There are far more comprehensive guides on the Internet - I'd recommend checking out TM4T's NQT guide, which has some fantastic tips for time management. Furthermore, I found it much more useful talking to colleagues working in my school for advice on how they manage day-to-day teaching, as every setting is different, and every school will have different policies and procedures that need to be followed.

Regardless, I thought a small series of "Tips for NQTs" might be a good use of some of my SBPC posts, if only to remind myself of the fundamentals of my teaching practice before September. Today's is probably my most important tip:

A great quick activity to get pupils out of their seats; this works particularly well at the end of a lesson for an exit activity and can be used for most topics.

This is a great way to get pupils collaborating in the classroom and focusing on the steps to solve problems. 

I discovered algebra tiles last year when, in a fit of desperation, I took to the Internet to find a good way of teaching completing the square in a way that might actually get it to stick in the heads of my Year 11s. 

I love using Tarsia puzzles - they're great for getting the pupils talking about their maths. If you're not sure what I'm on about, start off by popping over to Hermitech Labs to get a copy of the Formulator Tarsia software, then have a look at the premade ones that Craig Barton has collected on his site. Here are my top tips for getting the most out of Tarsia puzzles!

1. Use them three times
For topics such as linear sequences, I dig out the same Tarsia puzzle three times. For example, I would start off with a lesson on generating sequences, and get pupils to generate each sequence from the nth term rule and complete the puzzle that way. A couple of lessons down the line, after teaching finding the nth term rule, I then get the puzzle out again and get pupils to do it backwards. After a couple of weeks, I then get them to do it a third time, working in either direction, for revision. This is great for loads of topics with reverse processes, such as expanding/factorising and conversion between fractions/decimals.

2. Differentiate them
This is a tip from a colleague that goes a long way to making Tarsia much more accessible! Before reproducing the Tarsia puzzle, put a small dot in the centre of the "middle" pieces. This allows you to differentiate by either a) only handing out the centre of the puzzle first (thus helping those pupils who get overwhelmed by all the pieces), or b) giving them an idea of where to start with a complete puzzle. 

3. Make a poster
Print disposable sets on paper; they make very attractive revision posters! I still have one that a group of Year 7s did in my NQT year somewhere - I got the pupils to write explanations for a few examples around the outside.

4. Make it permanent
Print a copy of the "Table" tab, then Tippex over the answers, or block out electronically before printing. Copy one per pupil and you have a worksheet they can record their answers on if you (or they) want a permanent copy of their work.

5. Put a mistake in
One mistake works well, two is OK but more than that gets a little unmanageable. Challenge pupils to complete the puzzle, then tell you where the mistakes are, and correct at the end. I've done this accidentally on purpose a couple of times when I haven't checked my answers properly before photocopying a class set.

6. Pupils make their own
If pupils finish a puzzle, I hand them a page of blanks, then get them to create their own resource. They love doing this, and there's the added bonus that you get a few puzzles for free!

7. Have a competition
Once pupils are fairly proficient with a topic, encourage mastery and quick working by challenging the class to a timed competition (great board timer here). For particularly competitive groups, "Beat the Teacher" is always a favourite.

8. Enhance literacy skills
Keyword matches are a great use of Tarsia puzzles. Pupils could be given words and a brief definition or example (e.g. factor / number which divides exactly with no remainder), or a gap-fill (e.g. remainder / a factor is a number which divides exactly into another number with no               ).

9. To edge or not to edge
After a few years of doing Tarsia puzzles, I'm leaning towards puzzles that don't have questions along the edges. Although problems on edges make the puzzle more complicated to solve, I think this puts a lot of pupils off - if they accidentally pick four or five edge pieces to start with, then can't find the solutions, it can get quite disheartening and you spend a lot of time dealing with "I can't find this one". It's a personal choice, but I think plain edges are better for everyone involved.

10. Tell other departments about them!
In most schools I've worked in so far, Tarsia puzzles seem confined to the Maths department. However, a quick Google suggests that there are some schools using them creatively in other departments; a great example is in MfL for vocabulary learning. 

The emphasis is on peer coaching and using independent learning skills (e.g. prior knowledge or notes from previous lessons). It takes a bit of training to get them doing this properly, but it's worth doing. The first few times I run a rally coach with a new class, I get them asking me straight away rather than each other - I just refuse to answer until they get the message! Once we've done it a few times, I tell students to put deliberate mistakes in if they think their partner isn't fully engaged and listening to what they're saying.