Resourceaholic: September Update

In September I often write an update about some of the things I’m doing at school and outside of school, in case there’s some ideas that might help other teachers.

In my 2024 post September Routines I wrote about launching homework platforms, corridor etiquette and communicating with parents. We still do all these things. We’re also still running Papers Society (which I first ran back as a tiny ‘secret society’ in 2016, and has now been adopted on a large scale in hundreds of schools). It’s going very well this year – our current Year 11s are great at asking for help. On HoD Space we’ve had some helpful threads about how to maximise its success.

This year I’ve not introduced any big new initiatives at school – the majority of my time is being taken up by re-making revision and assessment resources – necessary because of changing term dates and shifts in MAT assessment dates. For example we normally give a revision pack to Year 11 and Year 13 over October half term to prepare for their first set of mocks, but this year they are going to have to have different topics in their mocks which means the packs we’ve used previously aren’t suitable.

Although we haven’t made any major changes to how we do things in my department this year, there are a couple of things we’re working on that might be of interest.

Department Initiatives

1. Snapshot Improvement

We have a school policy of doing end of unit tests (which we would do even if it wasn’t a school policy!). We call them ‘snapshots’ and in maths we’re expected to do two every half term. Apart from formal mid and end year assessments, this is the only marking we do. We get to know our students and their misconceptions well from marking their snapshots. This year we’re working as a team on improving our snapshot quality at Key Stage 3 and 4 – for example ensuring there’s enough space for workings and ensuring the right level of challenge and accessibility. We’re also working on improving what happens in the lessons when we return snapshots. I spent some time over summer making snapshots for the all the topics on our Higher Year 10 Scheme of Work. Here are links to examples of our first snapshot of the year on surds and indices – there are two levels of challenge: High (Grades 7 – 9) and Medium (Grades 5 – 7) (note that we don’t have any questions on rationalising with a conjugate, as we don’t do that on AQA). I’m always happy to talk more about how we do snapshots – over half term I will record a CPD video for HoD Space about this.

I’ve also been working on improving my A level snapshot review process to make sure A level students have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. I gave Year 13 a short snapshot on parametrics last week (short because of the time pressure) and gave them a tailored improvement task afterwards, depending on the nature of their errors. This was the first time I’ve used this format and it worked well. I have written about this in a lot more detail on HoD Space so check it out if you’re interested.

2. Axiom Launch

We offer a decent amount of opportunities for maths challenge and enrichment at my school, including Simon Singh’s Parallel programme, so we’ve been a bit slow on the uptake of Axiom Maths – it’s been around for a while but I didn’t have capacity to introduce something new. But Axiom comes with funding which means I’ve been able to offer a TLR to a ‘Maths Excellence Coordinator’, and now really we’re excited to get Axiom up and running. We introduced the idea to Year 7 and gave them a lovely task where they had to solve a problem and then tell us about their level of interest. We’ve now selected the students for our Maths Circle and I can’t wait to see how it goes – their first session is next week. We’ve had a lot of very positive emails from parents about it. There was a thread on HoD Space with some great ideas for keeping the momentum going on this.

My Lessons

1. Year 10

I’m delighted to be teaching Year 10 this year as I love the curriculum. I have Set 5 out of 8 – they do Higher Tier (the set below does Foundation) and from this group we normally get mainly Grade 5s and 6s, with a couple of Grade 7s. We started the course with indices and surds – both lovely topics (surds is one of my all time favourites!) and now we’re moving onto trigonometry. This allowed me to make a lovely segue from one topic to the other – my first lesson in the trigonometry unit will be on ‘Pythagoras with Surds’ which provides a great opportunity to revise Pythgoras, which they did in Year 8, and keep practising surds. There are a number of resources for this including some basic questions here and some more challenging questions here.

2. Year 11 Further Maths
I love it when I teach the annual indices lesson with my Year 11 Certificate in Further Maths class (this is a timetabled lesson – see my post The Option Block Experiment). The students in this class think they know indices really well because they’ve been taught fractional and negative indices in Year 10, plus they’re already pros at changing the base, but then I give them questions like this and suddenly they’re not in Kansas anymore:

Many thanks to 1st Class Maths for this example (from his video) and for the brilliant Equations with Indices resource on his Further Maths page. In my experience students find this set of questions challenging right from the first page – it’s a great example of finding depth and challenge in a seemingly straightforward topic. This is hugely engaging for the strongest mathematicians in the year group who sometimes find maths a bit too easy.

3. Year 13

I also delivered my favourite lesson of the year to Year 13 – integrating with trig identities. I always use an idea suggested by Stuart Price many years ago. I now call it my ‘pink lesson’ as I hand out pink paper – throughout the year when a student asks me how to integrate sin²x I will say “remember the pink lesson?” and they will magically remember the technique they need to use.

In Other News…
Outside of work, I’ve been receiving a lot of emails from maths teachers that are written using AI. When emails are written with AI the wording is always rather odd, and it’s hard to tell whether they are spam or they are genuine requests for help. I’ve also been receiving lots of emails from people asking me to include AI-generated websites and resources in my Gems posts. The world is changing rapidly… I don’t use AI myself though I appreciate it can bring advantages for some tasks. But being a huge fan of the immense craftsmanship that went into creating maths resources in the past, I’m concerned about the deskilling that’s currently going on – we’ll get to the point where no one actually knows how to write an email or plan a lesson. I suppose it doesn’t matter because we’ve probably only got a decade left before humanity meets its doom anyway – I just don’t know whether it will be Terminator-style or Matrix-style. And I don’t know which one I’d prefer.

Anyway, I must update you on the wonderful HoD Space, which is now my go-to place to have conversations with teachers. I prefer it to social media platforms because I can write longer posts with a lot more detail, and easily share resources, plus there’s no trolls, no unpleasantness and no one trying to make me feel stupid. I love it.

Craig and I have recorded three short podcasts where we chat about some of the topics of conversations on HoD Space – do have a listen here. We originally said that from October the free trial would drop down to two weeks but we have decided to keep it at four weeks permanently as this has worked really well. So join now, get a four week free trial with no card details requested upfront, and see what it’s like. We currently have questions that need answering and maybe you can help! We have questions about assessing students on iPads, booklets, mixed attainment, Year 6 taster days, how to get more Grade 5+ at GCSE, and how to support Year 7s who are working at Key Stage 1 level. Please join and help to answer these questions!