Tom Carpenter, AC for South Warwickshire and South Birmingham
Support for Core Maths in the West Midlands from the AMSP has continued this year, with professional development events running in Telford, Birmingham and Coventry.
The Introduction to Core Maths event run at the Innovation Campus in Telford provided teachers new to Core Maths with information in order to begin their teaching next year. Whilst engaging with a Core Maths quiz, teaching resources, students’ work on mathematical modelling and Excel spreadsheets for teaching financial maths, delegates were able to grow their knowledge, skills and confidence to lead Core Maths in the classroom.
The Supporting Core Maths event run at the Clayton Hotel in Birmingham on 7 March provided teachers with an opportunity to network and discuss with other teachers of Core Maths, and receive information about the qualification. With Critical Analysis as a theme for the day, teachers engaged with three areas of teaching:
- Best practice of delivering critical analysis and frequency trees in the Core Maths classroom, which included analysing newspaper articles and graphical representations for bias and inaccuracies.
- Reviewing 2018 pre-release materials from across the different examination boards, generating ideas for how to use them in the classroom and seeing how they were assessed in the examinations.
- Collaboratively planning some resources to use in the classroom to help students prepare for the 2019 examinations with regards to this year’s pre-release.
The next workshop will take place on 4 July and will include a review of the exam papers.
Core Maths was also introduced to ITT students at The University of Warwick on the 8th March. Trainees were briefed on the level 3 qualifications’ content and assessment structure and immersed themselves into the world of a Core Maths student engaging with classroom resources, knowing that they may find themselves delivering the course next year.