Formalising

We have a pretty rubbish consultant, employed by the local council rather than the school which use them, who nobody really likes. She seems to think that merely playing games and having activites which are rich is good enough in a maths department. It is not.

The trouble with maths teaching in this country is a focus on process and a narrow range of skills which is desired. So all this week so low ability year 8s did lots of rich activities on sequences and how this could be linked to graph. They drew some lines, they made their own shapes with some blocks and saw links between them and could draw some conclusions from this. Good. Could they answer some exam style questions about sequences? No.

So on Friday they had a very teacher led prescriptive lessons where they simply did the sort of questions they will see in a GCSE exam in two years time. They found the general term, they found the 50th term they had some multiple choice questions, they saw sequences that went up, they saw some that went up by non-integer values-they can now pass an exam.

And our department lives and dies by its results.

Do the rich tasks, let them play games then for then give them the boring stuff. They need it.