Liz Price, AC for Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton
As always, life at the University of Wolverhampton continues to be busy. Our enrichment events have included Celebrating Women in Maths, where over 100 students were informed of career opportunities in maths and some of the roles undertaken by women in industry. They also spent time engaged in three workshops that considered the role of maths in the real world.
We had held our annual Year 12 Problem Solving Conference in December where 56 students and 9 teachers from 6 different schools took part in a range of different workshops. This included approaches to STEM questions led by Ian Slater, a session on proof ledby Christine Watson, a session problem solving led by Ruth Fairclough and Kira Burton, and the Fun Maths Roadshow lead by Tamara Nevill.
We are currently hosting several Maths Hub Level 3 Work Groups at the University Science Park, including Developing A Level Teaching, Challenging Topics at GCSE and Problem Solving. We continue to offer varied professional development opportunities for local teachers; in December, Jan Parry and Liz Price hosted a Raising Confidence with Problem Solving course where we continued to cajole and stretch teachers, encouraging them to share classroom practice. In February, Matt Bickley and Liz Price did likewise with Raising Confidence with Higher Mathematics course.
We have several different professional development courses coming up this term, including Problem Solving at Higher Level on 8 April. Many more courses are planned for the summer term. Keep up to date by looking at the AMSP’s events listing.
The West Midlands Teacher Network continues to offer opportunities for teachers to engage in subject enhancement at Key Stage 3, 4 and 5. Led by Sue De Pomerai, Walsall Academy hosted a meeting on 14 February to analyse exam questions for the mechanics area of A level Mathematics, giving teaching tips to enable students to maximise marks. At the next meeting on 4 April, Paul Chillingworth will be doing a similar exercise for statistics, and on the 11 April, Christine Watson will be showing Key Stage 3 and 4 teachers how versatile the use of two coloured counters can be in secondary maths.