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Pupil Engagement in Maths

Jeavon Leonard – Portswood Primary SchoolBenn Lee – St Mary’s CE Primary School

+Food for thought…

“If young people are to become more powerful citizens with full control over their lives then they need to be able to reason mathematically – to think logically, compare numbers, analyze evidence and reason with numbers.”

Steen 1997

“Successful mathematical users size up situations and adapt and apply mathematical methods, using them flexibly”

Boaler 2009

+“Children need to solve ill-structured problems, to ask many forms of questions, to draw and visualise maths and to use, adapt and apply methods.”

Boaler 2009

Does our current practice allow this to occur?

+Inspiring Mathematics

Head teacher Jolie Kirby stressed the importance of male and female role models, including teachers and outside speakers to inspire the students. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25243274

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+Discussion

and Reflection

+Even place value can be fun!

+Estimation?“Estimation is the most useful mathematical activity”

Cockcroft Report (1982)

+Estimation – Narrow the range

Lowest number that it could be?Highest number that it could be?Use to make a more accurate estimate…

+Works with bigger problems

What is the average age of

the people in this room?

+ Class, School, City & National Competitions for Pride and Prizes

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+Real world maths V school maths

“One clear difference between the work of mathematicians and school children is that mathematicians work on long and complicated problems that involve combining many areas of mathematics. This stands in stark contrast to the short questions that fill the hours of maths classes and that involve the repetition of isolated procedures.”

Boaler 2009

+ Let Them Show Off

How big is the screen of an iPhone that combines the screens of every iPhone ever sold?

+www.stupidcalculations.com

How long would it take to drink an Olympic swimming pool through a straw?

How many serves of McDonalds fries could be salted using the road salt used by New York City in one winter?

What is the value of the time spent by apple users should they all choose the read the terms and conditions when updating to iOS8?

+ And the entirely inappropriate yet mind blowing,

+The flexible mathematician

Do we see our children use such approaches?Under pressure?

+The new curriculum?

Paper 1: Arithmetic30 marks

Paper 2 and 3:“assess pupils ability to solve problems and reason…”“contain a mixture of contextualised and context-free questions, and real life and abstract problems” – 80 Marks

“Pupils will not be allowed to use calculators in any part of the mathematics test.”

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+Collaboration

Advantages:

Learn from one another’s work

Increase the quality of ideas

Sharing the ‘eureka’ moment of problem solving

+Collaboration

Students need to talk through methods to understand if they really understand them or not.

“Explaining them to somebody else is the best way to know whether they really understand.”

“It is very hard to reason about mathematics when working in silence. Students who learn to reason and to justify their solutions are also learning that mathematics is about making sense.”

“Talking is critical in mathematics if we are to give children the depth of understanding that they need.”

Boaler 2009

+How We Attacked it

We gathered our resources calculators and information about iPhones.

We started noting down all the information we needed

how many iPhones were sold a their screen sizes.

When we did all of this we started multiplying for the area.

+How We Attacked it

Doing this challenge changed how we saw maths;

our maths wasn’t boring it was real. We used to see maths as something we had to do

and something we could not avoid. However when we investigated the challenge we

saw maths as art.

As a 4 man team, including Mr. Lee, we completed this prodigious task which changed our lives.  After the task we were pleased that Mr. Lee told us we were going to do more challenges like this.

+How We Attacked it

We had to use all our maths skills: multiplying, dividing, adding, subtracting, area knowledge, conversion skills and teamwork.

We also used advices teachers had given to us over the years. And our general knowledge, we even tried to compare the iPhone tower to famous buildings

+Collaboration and reflection

Abdul, Basit and I worked together as a group to complete this task.

We used different methods to check our answers, and we planned how we were going to do this challenge.

All of us discussed what we had to do, so we shared our roles.

We always worked as a team, if one of us made a mistake, we would help each other to get back on track.

Team work is the key to progress!

+Being pushed

We had to work really hard and continue to every day

Mr. Lee would not accept any answer; we had to try every possible way and refine our process

We have to follow the process We learn about a concept, then prove it, then reflect

Lots of people had high-expectation of us

We were poked and prodded so we elevated!