Ten teachers from across the country joined us for a Core Maths Online Support Group on Tuesday 9 February 2021. The group was composed of teachers who have been teaching the AQA 2A syllabus for at least one year, with the session supported by AMSP Area Coordinators Tom Carpenter and Lily Tang-Gentile.
Unsurprisingly, the dominating topic of the session was related to teaching remotely and assessing students in the coming months. Some people have been using Microsoft Forms for self-marking quizzes, whilst some were looking for more assessment material. Tom kindly showed us his work on Desmos classroom and how the classroom activities allow students to pace themselves, giving more flexibility to the teachers in remote learning, so much so that he has moved almost all of his PowerPoints to Desmos classroom activities.
We also discussed the idea of teaching data interpretation using one of the large datasets from different sources, including the LDS from the A level specification. This would allow teachers to use the same dataset to teach all the content related to data, including bivariate data and the normal distribution. Many of us see the benefit of teaching students to analyse data from a real dataset, rather than doing calculations from some arbitrary numbers. However, there were mixed feelings about student’s Excel skills, though remote learning has helped as we no longer need to book a computer room.
We hope to continue meeting in these Core Maths support groups next term, especially as we’ll be heading closer to assessing Year 13.