Project Phases
This project involves colleges and school teacher of post-16 GCSE resit maths in two distinct phases.
Phase 1: September 2017 - June 2018
In this phase the project team at the University of Nottingham will work with between 15 and 20 teachers who will become Lead Teachers for the second phase.
Phase 1 will require 10 days of the teachers' time. This will be a mix of both usual teaching time and other days or twilight sessions that will be out of standard teaching hours. Individual teachers will be paid for their time in the latter instance. When the time involved is during usual teaching hours the college/school will be compensated with a payment for teacher release.
Lead Teachers will work with the project team to develop a Professional Development programme that will be used in Phase 2 of the project.
The PD programme will focus on five key areas of the maths GCSE curriculum that will be identified as essential to improving students' conceptual understanding in maths that is fundamental to doing well at GCSE, such as proportional reasoning. There will be an additional focus on five important pedagogies that support dialogic teaching.
Further to this the PD model will involve an element of collaborative lesson study: the Lead Teachers will in this first phase take part in such activity and learn how to facilitate this effectively with a strong emphasis on mathematical content knowledge for teaching.
Lead teachers will be expected to have:
- strong mathematics subject knowledge
- extensive experience of teaching towards GCSE maths including resit classes
- commitment to teaching using dialogic approaches
- experience of working with colleagues on professional development
If you are a Head of Maths, Senior Leader or Teacher of Maths and know someone who could potentially contribute as a Lead Teacher in Phase1 please contact both Geoffrey Wake and Kanchana Minson.
Phase 2: September 2018 - June 2019
This is the trial phase in which the Lead Teachers will work with colleagues from approximately 50 colleges/schools implementing the PD programme. The Lead Teachers will need to commit to seven days in this phase, again with a mix of time both in usual teaching time and at weekends or in 'twilight' sessions.
The project needs to recruit in total 100 colleges/schools for the trial. Following recruitment half will be randomly allocated to the intervention group that will be involved with the PD programme. The other half will continue as usual. Of course, the control group teachers will be able to take part in the programme in the following year – after the trial. We hope to involve two teachers from each college/school in the programme during the trial if possible.
The teachers involved in the trials will need to commit to 5 days of professional development work which will involve working in a small collaborative group with teachers from other colleges/schools led by a Lead Teacher. The time required may be a mix of college/school time and twilight or Saturday sessions.Both intervention and control groups will be required to provide some data to the evaluation team at the beginning and at the end of the trial.
If you are interested in being in the trial of Maths-for-Life please contact Kanchana Minson.