Liz Price, AC for Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton
October is always a busy month at the University of Wolverhampton. We have already run two one day CPD courses, and a West Midlands Teacher Network Meeting.
Jan Parry, Matt Bickley and Liz Price engaged, cajoled and stretched teachers at the Raising Confidence with Reasoning event, with lots of logic and reasoning problems used to develop and share classroom strategies. Feedback was excellent, with teachers commenting “quick tasks that can be put straight into lessons” and “a broad range of reasoning task given and thought provoking ways of delivering them”.
Feedback was also excellent for our GeoGebra for Beginners course, delivered by Paul Chillingworth. Attendees said that they enjoyed “using the software live and with excellent support”, and felt more confident by the end of the training.
Additionally, we are holding a heat for the Senior Team Mathematics Challenge (STMC) competition, and we are expecting several schools to join in the first of our Celebrating Women In Maths days. These days are aimed at Year 10/11 girls, and hope to increase confidence in their maths ability. We run three workshops that develop maths that can be applied to real life, and have a range of speakers from different areas of industry that focus on where maths can take you.
We also participated in the Monster Confidence event for girls interested STEM careers at Millennium Point, Birmingham. Students from all over the West Midlands were mentored, interviewed and generally inspired by female speakers from GCHQ and PwC. We took a variety of maths puzzles and games which engaged and entertained students and generated lots of questions about the maths involved.