Shares

Exam Questions Data Handling

I have been in the process recently of creating personalised exam question topic sheets for my intervention groups. This allows me and the students to identify individual areas of strengths and weaknesses. The students then work on the skills needed to improve. I don't allow the students move forward till they gain 90% plus on the tests. I've started creating topics for the New GCSE content also to hopefully ease the workload next year.

All of the tests are two pages and less than 20 marks. I find it easier to print as two pages per sheet. Once I have finished editing the last few into a sharable form for Data Handling I will upload the spreadsheet I use to track the results students results in. This is a work in progress and I will be adding to this over time please be patient.

Comment (1)

The Homework Workload

Homework in general is one of the most debated topics amongst teachers. Several teachers believe homework has a great deal of purpose and value while many others feel it’s a box ticking exercise to please parents and SLT. Let’s face it who honestly likes the workload homework creates? Extra planning, marking and feedback time is needed for the teacher and the students are spending several hours after school completing extra work. This all sounds pretty negative? It isn’t honestly.

Homework can play an integral role in a student’s educational life and learning of a topic. The real key though is homework needs to be planned for and have purpose. There are three main areas which many teachers successfully implement which have an impact on learning at the same time as reducing the workload.

Comment (4)

Planning Ahead

When planning for a new topic it's important to look at the bigger picture and the journey you may want to take your class on with a topic. I say may because more often than not our best laid plans change and for good reason, however being aware of what they may change to makes it easier to manage. Personally, to do this I used to make lists and sub list of list which then had their own sub lists, as you can see I found this helpful but it sometimes got confusing. Michelle Dunning who is at Acklam Grange School as KS4 lead in maths introduced me to using mind maps to help plan out a topic. This soon speed up my process and helped the connections make sense.

Comment (2)

DIRT Resources

DIRT maths question bank marking and feedback

Created by teachers for teachers, to help improve the work life balance and also the consistent quality of feedback our students receive. With an aim to be a continuously evolving document. Please contribute to the DIRT Bank simply by emailing the DIRT question(s) you’ve created and your name/twitter handle to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and I will update the bank weekly.

DIRT - Dedicated/Directed Improvement Reflection Time

This Bank provides DIRT Questions for many mathematcal topic areas, with a structured response to a question, and also questions to complete independently on each topic. The bank aims to provide students with a consitent high level style of effective feedback and DIRT time, as well as providing the teacher with work life balance, aiming to prevent teachers in every school duplicating each others work. I will be blogging about it here, on how this looks within the classroom this weekend. This is a system I have developed over two years and I believe is now at a stage of sharing. Please help myself and other teachers by writing just one or even two questions on topics you have noticed is missing.

Comment (1)

Maths Murder Mystery II

Inequalities maths murder mystery investigation

In order to help develop my students problem solving skills I created a second murder mystery, my first murder mystery can be found here. Students were tasked in the first ten minutes of the lesson to practise their graph drawing skills and then discussing what the regions either side of the line represented. As a class we had a group discussion after think, pair, share and discovered how to shade regional inequalities. It was great to be able to allow the students to discover these facts for themselves using their previous mathematical knowledge.

Comment (1)

Danielle Bartram

Maths Lead Practitioner

Acklam Grange School

Middlesbrough

More Articles ...

Danielle Bartram

Maths Lead Practitioner