With more schools and colleges offering the qualification and more students signing up than ever before, Core Maths is back for another year. With more teachers delivering it for the first time also, there are more opportunities for professional development to help them do the best job they can.
There are currently two New to Core Maths programmes running within the region. The Central Maths Hub are running face-to-face workshops starting in December, and they’ll continue across the spring term with a further three sessions.Origin Maths Hub’s programme has already begun, but another four sessions are still available for anyone across the West Midlands region to join online. As the name suggests, the programme aims to support teachers who are new to teaching Core Maths in developing specialist knowledge for teaching the qualification and to increase their confidence in delivering it in the classroom. There’s a plan to run an online Developing Core Maths Pedagogy Work Group across the West Midlands region in the new year. These Work Groups give teachers opportunities, through collaboration and experimentation, to develop improved teaching approaches that support the open-ended problem-solving skills Core Maths that students need to develop, and to share these with departmental colleagues.
The AMSP are continuing their ongoing support for teachers with their national professional development programmes. The Core Maths Winter Festival is returning in January and offers a series of talks by inspirational speakers, each designed to enthuse, challenge and enlighten you about maths in the world around us. They offer a springboard to the creation of authentic and engaging contextualised maths lessons. The Core Maths Specification Networks are running half–termly online, which give teachers the opportunity to discuss and share experiences and to develop their practice around the teaching of Core Maths with other teachers who are delivering the same course. For those in need of some subject knowledge enhancement of the main topics in the Core Maths courses, the Live Online Professional Development (LOPD) Common Topics courses are commencing in January and provide the perfect opportunity to do this.