Today BHS had a student free day during which they ran allday PD with a focus on numeracy, and specifically the aspects of numeracy on which their NAPLAN results showed they needed to improve and also could be incorporated into every subject area. So the result of this was we (the maths faculty) spent the day helping to run workshops designed to help all the non-maths staff in incorporating these numeracy skills into their task design in their own subject areas. There was abit of a shortage of people to offer workshops, and I volunteered to help run a workshop. We got the probability workshop to run, so I made some resources and off we went. Although there where other parts to the PD day, some of which where actually really awesome (specifically the starter activity), I’ll focus on the workshop I helped run, partly because it is the part I can report most accurately about, but also because it is the part I can most readily provide evidence for.

In collaboration with one of my mentor teachers, I made up some slides to help structure the workshop we ran. The structure of the workshop could then be further broken down into three components:

A starter activity we used to try and get people engaged right off the bat as they walked in the room. We came up with a list of key terms to discuss/ introduce definitions for/ distinguish between, but before we got to that we printed out a list of worded statements corresponding to various degrees of certainty. We printed these out on peices of paper, handed out some blue tack, marked a scale at the front of the room from zero to one hundred percent certain, and got people to arrange the statements in order of certainty. The list of key terms of degree of certainty statements are also available as a *.docx file.
After running the degrees of certainty activity and using it to discuss the relationship between quantitative and qualitative descriptions of probability, we moved on to introduce the Monte Hall problem (also available as a *.docx file) in order to prompt a discussion and realisation of how fundamentally counter-intuitive and confusing probabilities can be.
Finally, I introduced the concept of randomised response surveying (also avaiilable as a *docx file)as a technique to collect unbiased data on sensitive questions which might normally prompt untruthful survey responses.

The workshop was very successful and we got alot of very positive feedback on it afterwards. I even had one staff member approach me several days later and thank me, because she had apparently suffered from severe maths anxiety, having a minor panic attack on the morning of the PD day because she realised it would have a numeracy focus, but she said that our workshop had opened her eyes to the possibility that maths might not actually be all that scary and more connected to concepts with which she felt comfortable than she had previously realisd. This was really awesome, straight up.