No, not these gems: http://www.resourceaholic.com/p/maths-gem.html
These ones: https://www.gemsworldacademy-switzerland.com/
One of the great advantages of Twitter is that it allows me to communicate with a lot of UK maths teachers, despite the fact that I work 1000km away in Switzerland. So I was particularly excited when I found out that one of the teachers I am in touch with happens to work just 30 minutes along the lake (the Suisse-Romande version of “down the road”) from me. Last week, I paid a visit to Dan Pearcy and his department at GEMS, so I thought I’d write about what I learned there.
The first thing that really stood out was how different the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program (MYP) is from GCSEs. The pupils frequently produce pieces of work (I guess we would call them controlled assessments), which count towards their final grade and are assessed against different objectives. The first one – knowing and understanding – seems familiar to GCSE teachers. The other three – investigating patterns, communicating and applying mathematics in real-life contexts – are all clearly important parts of mathematics education, but it seems that they are taken much more seriously in the MYP.
Teachers are expected to understand a wide range of types of pupil inquiry and, for example, teach pupils to create their own problems and write clear conclusions. If you’re a teacher who particularly values these parts of mathematics (perhaps you’re sad about the demise of GCSE coursework), then I suspect that you would really enjoy teaching the MYP. The catch? You still have to teach the same curriculum content as GCSE, so it’s tough to fit everything in. I have seen nowhere near enough to conclude definitively but it seemed to me that, at times, understanding of mathematical ideas was sacrificed in order to allow sufficient time to learn how to apply them. I know several teachers who think that this is a good thing: one ex-colleague used to advocate heavily for this approach.
Moving on to some positive points that I picked up from the lessons I observed. Some simple, but when you’re the only maths teacher in a school, it’s really useful to have a reminder:
- In two lessons I observed, I was reminded of the general principle of ‘pictorial before abstract’. The lessons were on gradients and lengths of line segments, to year 7 and 9 respectively. In both, the initial questions had lines clearly drawn on grids, which enabled pupils to apply the key ideas, without the cognitive load of dealing with coordinates.
- Every lesson I saw ended with a ‘plenary’: even if brief, the summary of what pupils had learned tied things together nicely.
- Common sense checking of answers was encouraged. “Does it look about right?”
- All of the teachers gave regular time warnings before a change of activity – a classic strategy, but good to see it being used well.
- With a small class, giving pupils the opportunity to have a go at an example themselves just before / simultaneous to a teacher demonstration – gives the higher-achieving pupils chance to try their ideas, whilst supporting pupils who can’t see what to do.
Finally, it was really interesting and useful to talk to Dan about leading a department and growing a school from scratch. We discussed homework marking policies and how parents can be unhappy about inconsistency between teachers. One thing that particularly struck me was that it seemed, based on a short visit, that keeping the teachers in his department happy was Dan’s first priority. This may be common, but was not the case with my first two HoD’s, who prioritised consistent pedagogical approach and exam results respectively, so it was good to see it.