GCSE Revision...with Y9! (Relay)

Last month, during the Easter holidays, I saw a tweet from @Ms_Kmp with a link to an idea on her blog to make GCSE revision more fun.

See her blog post here. Check out the rest of her blog too for some great ideas.

Our Y9s are sitting a mock METHODS in Mathematics paper next week in preparation for setting them for Y10 and to give them an idea of what will be expected next year. All bar the top sets will be sitting the foundation paper. As I teach one of the top sets I decided to put @Ms_Kmp's idea into practice. Here's how I did it...

We gave out a topic list to all classes as to what was on the mock paper and therefore what they should be revising for the examination (just the non-calculator paper). I asked the class, after giving out the topic list, if there were any topics in particular that they saw on the list that they had little or no idea about and then highlighted these to focus on in this week and next's lessons prior to their examination. The topics that were identified here were predictably Venn Diagrams, Surds, Standard Form etc.

I decided, on seeing @Ms_Kmp's tweet, that I would, in the first instance, use her revision lesson to go over a past paper, focusing on all the topics the class should be able to do based on the topics learnt to date. This way I could then identify those topics they'd need some more support on.

So, I browsed the Edexcel emporium (www.edexcelmaths.com) for some past exam paper questions that were similar to those that they would be faced with in their mock paper. I then put all of these questions (15 in total) into one word document. At the same time, I picked out the answers to each of these questions from the official mark schemes and put these in a separate document. I then, with the help of my tutor group, cut up the past paper questions document into individual questions so that I had 15 piles of the 15 questions. These were then put at the front of the class on the 2 tables where I would sit my G&T students.

On the tables at the front of the class I also put 4 copies of the mark scheme document for the G&T students to use throughout the lesson. The 4 students I chose were those who have consistently performed well this year and will be aiming at the level 8s come the end of the year. These students, as suggested, are also on the school's G&T register for Mathematics. At the start of the lesson I briefed these students on their role and explained the terminology of the mark scheme and how they should 'mark' the rest of the class' work using the mark scheme. Whilst they were browsing through this and familiarising themselves I was setting the rest of the class up. I asked the class to get themselves into teams of 2 or 3 students. They then had to allocate roles within their groups. One person was to be the 'runner' - the person who would take their questions up to the markers and then get the next question. One person was to have the final say on the groups answer to the questions before the runner would take them to be marked and the final person/s would be working through the questions with the group and keeping an eye on the class spreadsheet.

The class spreadsheet was where I came in. As the groups were arranging themselves I set this up on the IWB and put the group's names into it. Then, throughout the lesson I updated this with the questions the class were getting correct/incorrect. This gave a clear indication to the class as to which group was on which question etc.

The activity started with each group being given the 1st question. Once they felt they knew the answer they would go to the markers. If they got it right they would be given the next question and the markers would hand me their answer to update the spreadsheet. If they got it wrong they would be told how many marks they got and then a 'dash' would be put at the top of their question to indicate that they'd already got it wrong once, if they got it wrong a second time it would be marked incorrect and given to me for updating the xls. They would then be given the next question.

The lesson worked extremely well with the whole class engaged and trying to beat the other groups in terms of the question they were on and the accuracy of their answers. My 'markers' were fantastic and they all were actively marking groups' work and suggesting where they had gone wrong in line with the mark scheme. I told them that they could offer advice as to what the groups had done wrong in order for them to adjust their answers and this was a really positive experience for them. They were, at first, concerned by the fact they would not actually be answering the questions themselves, but I allowed them to have a copy of the questions to try as they were doing the marking themselves and I told them that by looking at the mark scheme and marking their peers' work that they'd be doing more than it first may have appeared. I believe that by them seeing the mark scheme, and working with it, that it will enable them to see where they pick up all the marks and how the 'workings' are needed and just by what extent in terms of the marks awarded for them. In our next lesson I am going to get them to feedback to the rest of the class what they found by doing this role and what they learnt from it - hopefully here they will be able to give the rest of the class tips when doing their exam.

Here's how the front of the class looked - the markers' desk...

This was right at the end of the lesson (I almost forgot to take a photo) and so it looks a little bit chaotic! The questions are to the right of the picture on the end of the tables - groups were to take the next question along each time. You can see the mark schemes on the desks the markers were using.













Here's a selection of the marked questions that were handed to me...

Hopefully you'll be able to see the marking on these, the corrections some of the groups had to make and those that had a 'dash' put on their sheets to indicate an initially incorrect answer?









Below, you can see the spreadsheet at the end of the lesson. I have deleted the names to keep my guys anonymous. I used some conditional formatting to highlight all the correct answers (1) and the incorrect answers were left as normal (0). From this I can now see that I need to, next lesson, go over HCF and LCM and enlargements from a centre of enlargement. These will form the basis of the starter of my lesson and then I'll go onto covering Venn Diagrams with the class (based on feedback from the class on their topic trackers). Here's the spreadsheet...

As you can see, group 5 managed to answer all their questions correctly. Group 9 were unable to answer question 7 as there weren't any questions left - some groups needed a spare as they had scribbled all over theirs. I put the topics of each question on the xls too so the class could see what was coming up!




If you do use this idea it'd be great to here how and how the lesson went for your class. Oh, and remember to thank @Ms_Kmp for the idea and to visit her blog http://mathssandpit.co.uk/blog/.

Similar Triangles

As I've hinted at in another recent post, I have been part of an exciting project the TES Maths Panel have been putting together - 'Topic Progressions'.

These documents have already been a great resource to me and my teaching and I have recently used the Shape - Similar Shapes 'Topic Progression' to find resources/questions for my teaching of this topic. One of the resources I therefore subsequently used from the TES was this resource --> http://www.tes.co.uk/resourcedetail.aspx?storyCode=6291667

If you click on the link in the resource it will bring up the 'Teach Maths' website (http://www.teachmaths-inthinking.co.uk/activities/similar-triangles.htm). On this page of the site it details an activity involving 24 similar triangles and is a lovely open ended task to give to students.

So, with the resource saved, the teacher notes read and the documents printed I was ready to go for my Y9 set 1 lesson on similarity of shapes. This would be the class' 1st lesson on the topic and as such I left the activity as open as possible to see what learning they may have had previously or thoughts they already had towards the task. As suggested on the site, I gave each group (my classes are all sat in groups now) a print out of the 24 triangles and got them to 'group'/'classify' the triangles as they saw best.
The interesting thing here is that, of the 5 groups of 6/7 students, 4 groups chose to classify the triangles by grouping them into 'equilateral', 'isosceles', 'right-angle' and 'scalene' triangles. There was one group that grouped them by size i.e. small triangles, middle sized triangles and large triangles. After this class discussion on how each group had classified the 24 triangles I asked them what they knew about similar shapes. One of my students then said that they were shapes where all the angles were the same. This then lead to us discussing that the similar shapes are enlargements of one another and that we can use the scale factor to work out missing lengths.

The class then had their task set - they were to find all 3 lengths of each triangle using their knowledge of similarity. They were not permitted the use of rulers or protractors but I hinted at placing triangles on top of one another to see if their angles were the same (and therefore they were similar triangles). I set the groups off on the task and this is how they started...

I gave each group one of my A1 sized magic whiteboard sheets to work on (these are available from www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk). They were given a good 10-15 minutes to attempt to find the missing lengths of the triangles with little input from me needed at this stage.

 Here's one of the groups attempt at beginning to sort out the triangles into similar triangles groupings

After about 10-15 minutes, when the groups were getting to the point where they were missing a few triangles' lengths, and they had done the perhaps, 'easier' ones I hinted that there were 8 groups of 3 similar triangles at this should help them work out which 3 triangles go together to work out the missing lengths.

At the end of the lesson I showed the class the correct lengths of all the 24 triangles and they marked their work as a group. The majority of groups got between 15-17 out of the 24 correct. One group got 22 correct. So, there's a little more work we need to do as a class on similarity and we'll be continuing with this next week.


I'd definitely recommend running this activity to others and I'll probably be using this with my Y10's too as Similarity and Congruence is a topic that comes up in both Unit 1 and 2 of the METHODS in Mathematics exam they are currently sitting - it'll be a chance for us to revise and reinforce our previous learning earlier in the year!

What to do with Mock Exam Data!?

The start of the new term brought with it the start of a new year and the chance to refocus my attention on certain classes and procedures I have in place. It also saw me finish teaching the Edexcel METHODS in Mathematics Unit 1 content to my Year 10 class.
Monday this past week I had one of my school's NQT sessions. The session was on using data effectively and what to do with the information about your classes you have at your disposal. At lot of the things discussed in this meeting I was either already doing or had done in the past but needed a timely reminder of them.
The 1st week back after the Christmas/New Year break saw my Year 10 class sit a mock Unit 1 paper. Having then marked all of these papers I started to think about what I should now do with the results from this mock and how I would best support my students improve on their results and achieve their target grades. Here's what I've been doing over the past week...

The first thing I did was to, on the front of each students paper, put a sticker (kindly given to me by my Mentor after discussing the assessments) with the students target grade and their grade from the paper itself. This made it very clear to the students how far they were off their target or whether they had achieved their target grade on the paper.
I then, taking the spreadsheet created by my mentor that she sent out to the whole department, typed in each students marks on a question by question breakdown basis. This allowed me to see, as a class, the questions that on the whole were done well and those that needed some further teaching. It also allowed me to put in a VLOOKUP formula to calculate the students' grades based on the grade boundaries for the paper. Then, in a discussion with my mentor following this analysis she recommended I work out a 'value added' column to see how far off/on/above targets the class were.
Having then completed a question breakdown analysis for each student I was able to see which questions I needed to take the class through as a whole and I did this with the class in the lesson that I gave the students their papers back. I gave them their papers with their grades, an AfL sheet which stated each question, the topic covered by that question, marks available and then a column for the students to rate their RAG for the question, write in the marks they got on each question and then a column for 'actions'. The 'actions' column was for them to think about how they are going to improve on the questions they did wrong. In addition to given them these AfL sheets I then went through with them the 2 questions on the paper that stood out as being done poorly as a class - this was the manipulating algebra questions (a lot of factorising). This made me think about how I had taught this topic originally and why the topic hadn't stuck in the students minds - was it because I hadn't taught it well enough? Was it because we covered that topic nearer the start of the school year and they'd just forgotten it?
I then told the students, for homework, to do 1 of two things. The first (following feedback from the NQT session) was to complete a survey I had set up for the class on www.surveymonkey.co.uk to give their honest opinion on our lessons so far this year, their grades, what they felt needed improving, what was going well, what activities they liked best in class etc. The second was to go to my YouTube Channel (mrcollinsmaths) and watch the solution videos I had created from their mock paper for the questions they did not answer correctly.
I will then discuss with them the results of the survey (some of their responses are as useful as they are brutally honest) in our lessons next week.

However, I did not feel this feedback was effective enough and wanted to focus more individually on questions the individuals needed to work on in the class - perhaps the questions they should have got right but didn't for whatever reason. So, I went back to the spreadsheet and filtered out the results by their marks. This then put the top of the class at the top of the sheet and the bottom of the class at the bottom. From this filtering I was then able to group the students by their results.
I then aimed to do a group work lesson whereby I sat students according to their results in the mock paper. The interesting thing about doing this was that when I was grouping the students into groups of 6 (the top 6 students being in group 1, the second 6 students being in group 2 and so on) I was starting to notice patterns in the questions they got incorrect or scored low marks on. Pretty much in each 'groups' case there were one or two questions that these students all got wrong. So I decided that I would differentiate the tasks for each group based on these questions they all got incorrect. This then meant that in the 5 groups I had set up each group had 2 tasks to work on relating to 2 questions they got wrong in the mock paper. There was a clear level of increasing difficulty to the questions as you went from group 5 to 1, with a few overlaps in the groups. For example group 2 and 3 had 1 task that was the same (forming expressions and solving equations) and group 1 and 2 both had a factorisation task. I used tarsia puzzles and pre-prepared worksheets for each group so they could all support each other on the tasks.

Here's the resources I prepared and how I set up my room:

I gave each group a magic whiteboard www.magicwhiteboard.co.uk to work on and whiteboard pens/resources were on each table at the start of the lesson. The groupings were up on the board as the students came in and my number tiles were on the tables to direct them to the appropriate group. I explained at the start of the lesson why I had set the groups up in the way I had and that my intention was that each student was able to answer 1/2 questions from the mock paper at the end of the lesson that they weren't able to in their actual assessment. As the lesson progressed the great thing I found was that the top 2 groups were, for the first part of the lesson took care of themselves and were able to get straight on with the tasks they were given. This allowed me to go straight to groups 3 and 4 initially and give them support at their table so they were able to complete their tasks. Group 5 were busy at this point cutting out their tarsia puzzles and this allowed me the time to get to the other groups. When I finished explaining to groups 2 and 3 and covered any questions they had they were then able to get on with their tasks. I sat with group 5 and checked they knew what they had to do  (HCF and LCM) before then going to group 2 and 1 and giving them my input to move them on to the harder of the tasks they were given, this for group 1 meant going through factorising quadratic equations (coefficient of the x^2 term > 1) at the IWB (I purposefully sat them at the front for this reason).
At the end of the lesson I got students to revisit their AfL tracker sheets from the lesson before and fill in whether they felt more confident on their RAG scale and whether they now knew how to do the tasks they were set. I could see progress in the lesson as the groups had either completed their tarsia puzzles or completed their w/sheets, moved on to other tasks given at the IWB etc.

Here's a pic of group 5's completed tarsia on Prime Factor Decomposition (their 2nd task)...

The class worked well throughout the lesson and I feel had I not done this differentiated group work lesson that the students wouldn't have had sufficient feedback from their mock paper and wouldn't have known where they went wrong with at least a few of the questions. This also meant that they would now, if taking the paper again, would pick up more marks than they originally did, therefore improving their score.

The final thing I have thought about doing is, again after discussing the class with my mentor, set up a 'focus group' of those students who are significantly below their target grade. I already have students in a seating plan according to their target grades - in the hope that students on similar targets support each other achieve their similar goals, but also need to focus some more of my attention on 3-5 of the students that need an extra boost to achieve their targets.
I have informed the class of extra support sessions from me after school that are available and will be discussing this week with those students that are in this new 'focus group' about attending these sessions and will also aim to get their parents involved as I know they are supportive and will encourage them to attend the sessions.
I will blog more about this class in the future, after I have fed back the survey results, had a few of the after school sessions and thought more about how I can revisit some of the unit 1 topics whilst teaching the unit 2 content of the METHODS in Mathematics.

Group Work with Year 10 - Properties of Quadrilaterals

Set up before lesson...

On Thursday this week I decided to get my Year 10s to do a bit of group work to share their prior knowledge of properties of quadrilaterals. As I was hoping to just refresh the topic and check any misconceptions I decided this would be a great time to introduce group work to the class, complete with a change of layout to my room...again!

I laid out the tables in the above fashion and on each desk had one of my number tiles from 1-7 (for each group). I then, on each desk, had a blank piece of A4 paper ready for the first task. However, before doing this the class needed to be put into groups. When doing group work previously I have always sat down and spent far too much time on considering who to put in what group and who should/shouldn't work with one another etc and so this time I thought I'd use the idea I used with my newly setted year 7 class - do it randomly!
So, at the start of the lesson met each of the students at the door and gave them a question to which the answer was either 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, or 7. I purposefully made it that there were 4 questions to which the answers were one of the 7 numbers except for the answers 5 and 6 (these tables had 5 seats around them and so needed 5 sets of questions to which they were the answer - the reason for this was because there was most space around the tables in order for students to be sat comfortably around the room). I was very pleased with how well my room accommodates this sort of layout as it is massive :).
Once the students got their questions they then started by finding their table and took a seat. I checked as they were sitting down that certain personalities weren't in the same group and then moved a few people to account for absentees.

After the class were all sat down I told them why we were doing group work and then introduced the first task - a collective memory task from Mr Barton! see http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Collective-Memory-Types-of-Quadrilaterals-6063882/. This task involved groups organising themselves into 'runners' and one 'writer' and then, in turn, the 'runners' coming to the back of the room to look at the poster of quadrilaterals and then relay the information to the 'writer' in their group. This was fantastic as the students had to use their knowledge of quadrilaterals to explain what they had seen on the poster, including all notches, parallel line marks, equal sides, etc etc. After the task I revealed the poster for the benefit of the writers and even managed to get in a 'what percentage of you haven't seen this?' question. I then left the winning group up to a fellow teacher who was observing the lesson.
After this, I gave the class Mr Barton's w/sheet on quadrilaterals and gave them 5 mins to match up the shapes, names and descriptions. Here's Mr. Barton's w/sheet http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Properties-of-quadrilaterals-6030410/ and here's the online timer that I use... http://www.online-stopwatch.com/full-screen-stopwatch/.
I then went through the answers on the board (using the transparent SMART board button I discovered over half term (see previous post on SMART board training). What I liked about this task was that (as my colleague commentated) due to the fact the groups had worked together previously they were helping each other more than they may have done on the task and sharing knowledge.

After this I gave the class a series of dominoes that I had spent the previous evening cutting up and laminating in order to give 7 sets for each group. The resource can be found here... http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/Quadrilaterals-Dominoes-6024859/ and are by Not_Just_Sums. This worked well and was something that, even though I had spent all the time producing them, I forgot to put on my lesson plan when writing this up the morning after - I was very happy I managed to squeeze it in! This task again got students working in groups to share their knowledge and check each others' reasons as to why the dominoes were allowed to be laid where they intended.

Finally, we watched a short video about classifying quadrilaterals and then I gave each member of the class my ABCD fans (see previous post) and gave the class 10 quick questions to assess what they had learnt in the lesson - the class kept a tally and the majority of them got 9 or 10 of the questions right.
My colleague gave me her observation notes on the lesson and commented on lots of positive things in the lesson she had seen and would look to use in her lessons, she is a GTP student and so I was glad I could help provide some ideas for her lessons.

Group Work - 'Runners and Writers'

Another idea I used at ISSOS was a group task I had seen in Paul Ginnis' Teacher's Toolkit where students work in groups to recreate a poster or info graphic.

I had placed another large poster, this time from a broadsheet newspaper, in the corridor outside my classroom. I then got the class into 4 teams of 4 using a box of folded up names of each member of the class. When students were in their teams of 4 I got them to decide which one of them would be the 'writer'. The 'writer' would be the person who had to draw/write the information that the others would tell them. The remaining 3 people in each team were the 'runners'. These people had the job of 'running' into the corridor to look at the poster, remember the information on it and then tell the writer in the classroom what info was on it, where and what to draw/write. The groups were given about 20-30 minutes to try and recreate the poster in the corridor.

This task involved teams communicating with each other extremely well to get across the information needed.

In addition to the roles each member of the groups had there were some rules they had to abide by. Only the writer could write/draw on the A3 piece of paper they were given. The 'runners' could not draw or write anything. The 'writer' was not allowed to go into the corridor to look at the poster. The 'runners' were not allowed to take a picture of the poster, they could only use their memories. Only 1 'runner' from each team was allowed in the corridor at any one time and they must 'tag' another member of their team when back in the classroom to allow them to take their turn. All members of the team were allowed to talk to one another and this was where the main element of team work came in as  all the 'runners' after seeing the poster could speak with each other and the 'writer' to check they had recreated the poster as accurately as possible!

The tasks worked really well with teams doing an amazing job at recreating the poster - some of the drawings were phenomenal, based on the fact that the 'writer' literally had only their peers descriptions to go by!