Year 11 General Maths (BHS)

I started with the year 11s on Trigonometry, delivered a test on that topic, and then went into Networks.

Trigonometry

For my first lesson or two I made a traditional lesson plan, mostly to demonstrate to my mentor teacher that I could and for accountability purposes I suppose. After that though I didn’t feel it was necessary with this class. Later on I decided it was a good idea to do, not so much for me, but for the students and in particular students that where absent so they could know what content to catch up on. What this class seemed to respond too was a very classic whiteboard “chalk-n-talk” type approach.

I noticed very early on that my mentor teacher had a knack for reading what the students would respond too and so I tried to emulate that right from the start, it actually worked really well. A few (5-10min) of direct instruction from the whiteboad at the start of a lesson, then one-on-one discussion while the students worked for the rest was a repeated pattern throughout the term with this class. It worked particularly well because of both my and my mentor teachers relationship-building approach, and the relationships we managed to develop with the individual students in this class.

Revision

For revision of the trigonometry topic leading up to the test, I produced the following summary sheets and decision trees, as well as giving the studnets a lot of practice questions with some problem-solving/ worded questions included. Here is an example of what one of the other teachers gave their class for revision of the trigonometry section. I did a similar summary on the whiteboards, but I also gave my students the seperate summaries and decision trees below.

Summaries

These are the summary sheets I gave my students to help them revise for the test.

In this one, one of the students actually pointed out a mistake and so I made the correction and included a thank you in the corrected version.

Decision Trees

The following decision trees, which I gave the students to help revise for the trigonometry test along with the summaries above, ended up being so popular that we ended up allowing the students to have a copy of them during the test.

Test

After they completed the test and I had marked them all, written feedback, and reported their assessment results back to them I wrote up solutions to the test, annotated with comments on common mistakes and how to correct them

What follows are some student work samples from the test:

A few students did not do well enough to get a passing grade on the initial test, and so I wrote up a re-test (word *.docx version also available). I got very good feedback from the other teachers that they liked how I wrote the test, and this would lead to me writing more assessment items for them later in the term… the curse of competence, I suppose. The intension of this re-test was to allow these students the opportunity to demonstrate a passing standard for the topic.

What follows is the anonymised feedback and grades I reported back through Daymap jointly to the students and parents:

Networks

Lesson Outlines

Around the time we where finished with the trigonometry topic and started on networks, following some feedback from my mentor teacher I decided one of the things I wanted to improve on was posting mini-lesson plans to Daymap so that students who where absent could see what work they should try to catch up on, but also because the idea of posting “Success Criteria” really appealed to me as an easy way students could self-evaluate their own progress. Here are some examples of lesson outlines I posted to Daymap during this topic.

Networks Task

In addition to a small test there would also be a summative directed investigation assessment item for the networks topic. So I started the topic off with some content and some practice questions out of the textbook (see lesson outlines above), and gave them the investigation very early on so they would have time to work on it. Particularly because of how open ended the task is (which I like), the students could easily end up wasting alot of time trying to decide what they where going to do their assignment on, and not be left with much time to actually do the assignment (this totally happened, by the way. Urgh. Working on techniques to minimise this with open ended tasks is definitely something I want to work on and investigate in the future as I otherwise really love open ended tasks).

A week or two after i gave them the assignment, as I ramped up the pressure to get work done on it, I introduced a scaffold one of the other teachers wrote to help them structure their report.

Networks Test

At the end of week 9 right as I was leaving, the students where getting ready to hand up their networks assignment, and beggining to revise for the Networks test that they would get given in the following week. As everyone had been so happy with the job I did on the trigonometry re-test earlier in the term, and as I was willing, they asked me to write the networks test. So I did and I was pretty happy with the the outcome too. Here is the networks test I wrote, (as well as the source *.tex file is also available).