Home / Getting started / Later planning details

Planning later in the project: details

At FH the new HoD at the start of year 2 was concerned that in spite of a department commitment to raising the level of mathematical thinking there were still too many tasks being used which require application of arithmetic or measuring but avoid the abstract nature of mathematics, e.g. 'how much water do I use?'. He was keen that students should have multi-level experiences working with mathematical contexts, such as working with circles as a context for reasoning, formulae, exploring properties and relationships and applications. He was less keen on popular 'topics' like Fibonacci numbers because they too easily became a context for 'non-mathematical' things. He pushed an emphasis on abstraction. They had a good textbook, he said, but one or two teachers who had disagreed with the previous HoD did not use it. For our target cohort, planning for years 8 & 9 was ad hoc and up to individual teachers or informal groupings of teachers, but for the subsequent cohort there was a process of module planning and curriculum development in place.

LS was also unhappy with their tasks and the whole department agreed that they need a new curriculum for year 8, more responsive to students' needs. They decided to start from the focus of learning, lesson content and intended outcomes, rather than resources. The HoD developed a shared task to focus on planning multi-level, complex task sequences that would 'teach' particular topics but within a coherent, connected, body of work that would draw on and develop mathematical thinking skills.

Small groups of teachers were asked to discuss approaches to certain topics: one group focused on equations, another on area, another on understanding and expressing general statements, and another on multiplication. The key questions they had to answer were:

The teachers then regrouped into mixed groups, so that each new group contained someone who had worked on each of the four topics. They then had to work out a way to combine their thoughts into a task or series of tasks. Typically, teachers created tasks which used area as an array model for multiplication, with the need to shift to non-integer sides and sums of rectilinear shapes which might then be expressed algebraically and new questions posed such as: how can we express the fact that the areas of these shapes with unknown sides have to add up to 48 cm-squared? and so on. In this way, complex tasks were generated which convinced teachers that they could also 'cover' content and employ mathematical thinking while 'teaching' core content.

In SP during the first year teachers had free choice from a pack of ideas collated by Anna with the overall aim of developing thinking, but later moved to paired planning of modules focusing on curriculum coherence and content coverage. To ensure that these modules were planned with learning in mind, and used in complex ways of learning, rather than merely tasks to be worked through, each module had a cover sheet and teachers presented summaries of their work under these headings:

general discussion
formative assessment activities
main activities
games
starters
enders
key words
key mathematical ideas
misconceptions
difficulties
probing questions
homework tasks.

(link to module planning sheet)

In addition, the maths team did the tasks together and discussed the mathematics. Doing maths together included working through 'division' as presented in books for primary trainee teachers so that the team had some idea of students' primary school experience, i.e. the language, methods, layouts and underlying conceptual understandings of division that students might have experienced.