Its definitely been an interesting half term. Every day has certainly been different with its own and very unique challenges.
Background:
The school that I now work at has not had a permanent maths teacher for over 2 years. There were no structures in place and the levels and grades the students had were inaccurate. The school wanted me to put a new scheme into place and to invigorate maths within the school. Attendance by pupils at the school frequently changes on a daily basis. Generally there is a maximum of 6 pupils per class and it is often less than this. There is a lot of intervention, 1 to 1 tuition, a TA with every class and there are a number of pupils that are educated off site.
The children that I have the pleasure to work with are very reluctant to change. They didn't like the prospect of another new maths teacher, so the first big step for me was to build relationships. I introduced a concept that I heard from Bruno at a LIME event, called Visioneering. I showed an interest in the pupils dreams, ambitions and hobbies and this was my key into building the relationships. I have a large display in my classroom with their hopes and dreams which the pupils have responded well too. The next challenge was getting the pupils to trust me and to try and get them to enjoy maths. I had lots of interactive games and varied activities. Any work has been marked prompty and I've used loads of the Mr Men praise stickers from @solvemymaths. The pupils love these and often question their names, which is great for getting oracy into the lesson.
Assessments and any form of test have been a struggle at this school. I've never seen tensions so high. After working at this school I will never look at an assessment in the same way again and the stress that it causes for SEN children. For this half term I will be giving as much notice as possible, rewards through the test (e.g sweets, drinks, praise cards, anything) These children have so much anxiety with tests, I'm going to work on changing their mindsets and to look at techniques to help with anxiety.
The Changes
Taking all of this information on board I set to work on a mastery scheme of work, which needed to be flexible for the daily challenges and attendance. So far, the slow, steady and differentiated mastery scheme is a great success. The autistic children inparticular have been amazing, their retention capabilities are outstanding. When these children thourghly understand a topic, they can apply to different contexts very easily, however, a lot struggle to verbally communicate their reasonings, a lot of the time I get the response "because it just is or works"
At the start of term I introduced TTRockstars. This has been one of the huge successes at the school. The school is predominantly male and they are all very competitive. They all love the competitive online version of TTRockstars. I cannot recommend this site enough. Within a space of 7 weeks I've seen pupils improve quite significantly with their timestables. It's been a pleasure to watch pupils engage so much with their timestables. At the start of this half term I have given all teachers a login for TTRockstars, this has added another competitive edge for the pupils, and I'm looking forward to see what it brings.
The next resource that has been implemented is NumeracyNinjas. Again, this has been a huge success. NumeracyNinjas has helped identify gaps in the pupils learning, and they all have different gaps due to their different attendance patterns. The first class that I tried NumeracyNinjas with was a flop, however, the reason for this was that a lot of these pupils struggle with time constraints (most of the pupils will get extra time in any external exams) After the time constraint was abolished, NumeracyNinjas was a success, Pupils loved seeing themselves improve up the different coloured Ninjas. I added an extra challenge of getting 3 consecutive black Ninjas in a row, which would give them Grand Master status. The deputy head got involved too, she dresses up as a black belt ninja on a weekly basis to give certificates and badges out in celebration assembly. The next challenge for the Grand Master pupils is to complete the worksheets within the 5 minute time limit.
Finally the last problem that I had during the first half term was how to monitor the off site pupils progress, and HergartyMaths has answered my prayers to this. I've been extremely fortunate to get my school to trial the new HegartyMaths site. I can honestly say that it is amazing and its changing the progress of the pupils that are taught off site. The site has allowed me to monitor what these children are doing and is providing them with more maths specialised tuition that is currently not available from the support TAs that this them. I cannot express how much of an impact that it has already made to these children.
Next Steps:
My next challenge is to try and implement Numeracy Across the Curriculum and to make sure that it is embedded throughout the school.
