Home / Getting started / Initial planning details
Initial planning details
In the early stages of planning teachers kept to the plans provided in the national framework and saw planning as mainly a resourcing exercise, and resources were obtained from published schemes. In two departments these were collated by the head of department, in the third one this was done by individual teachers and then discussed with the whole department. The latter school spent a substantial number of departmental meetings on this discussion in the academic year leading up to the change. In some departments preparation with the whole mathematics team prior to implementation did not happen due to time constraints or staff not yet being in place - heads of department collated suitable resources.
The hope in all schools was that all teachers would contribute to the development of more resources. At LS, where time had been set aside for planning and evaluating as a team, all teachers contributed from the start. At the other two schools contributions were more sporadic until, at SP, teachers were enrolled in a Diploma course and chose paired curriculum planning as their project for assessment.
At this stage the problems of teaching all-attainment groups were seen by most as problems of finding the right tasks. In SP this was seen from the start as about developing a wide range of ways to work on mathematics, developing their thinking and engagement, laying down habits for future work. In the other two schools tasks were sought which would allow differentiated learning outcomes within a related range of content. In LS teachers often presented tasks to each other as 'good ways to teach such-and-such' with comments like 'it works', and this was often supplemented with comments about the order of tasks, students' alternative conceptualisations, and the need to develop resilience and resourcefulness in their ways of working. In FH we did not see anyone presenting ideas for teaching except the HoD who had developed a way to engage all students with algebraic thinking, not dependent on published sources, and sometimes showed others the ways she taught. She reported that, as the year went on, more people presented ideas.
In all departments there were discussions before the end of the previous term about how they would teach year 7, but these were of different extents.
Anna, the Spenser (SP) HoD had wide experience of available resources for extended and exploratory tasks, so she collated a bank of resources from ATM, SMILE, GAIM, CAME, DIME and other sources for teachers to draw on. The team started working together at the end of the previous term including a workshop in which they all did maths together.
In Field Harrow (FH) the second-in-depatment prepared a file of ideas and resources for teaching, an existing scheme of work based on medium term plans from the National Mathematics Framework. Due to the lateness of the decision to teach in all-attainment groups there had not been time to prepare jointly, and the plan was to devote a considerable proportion of department time to discussing how to teach during the first year.
At Lawrence Sterne (LS) the whole departmental team worked extensively to produce materials, each teacher being responsible for preparing a few weeks' worth of tasks under significant mathematical headings which, taken overall, conformed to the Framework suggestions for year 7. These were presented and discussed at department preparation meetings. The programme for production was set early on to ensure that this process continued during the year 7. Extra weekly meetings early in Thursday mornings were instituted for curriculum and planning discussions for those teaching year 7. In all, about 20 hours were spent with the whole team together for this planning.
