*Edit and disclaimer* The following post doesn't detail my confusion as to what the Inquiry for 2022 actually was. In subsequent posts you will see that my Inquiry was into Extended Discussion. This post was written before that decision was made. The principal talked about improving children's wellbeing and motivation to come to school in the new post lockdown era (seen in the post prior to this). That is what I got fixated on.
Post-ish Covid Teacher Inquiry...what to do? My Teacher Inquiry has already been chosen for me, but frankly, I don't see it as something I need to put too much thought into. More on that later.
Right here I will bullet point the maths programme that I had started last year with Grant Ogilvie (Go for Teaching) but wasn't able to continue. The details are as follows:
- Number knowledge & algebra, other strands, and strategy are taught on separate days in the week.
- The above divisions are taught every week.
- Other strands are taught in detail throughout the term. This is where the blog posts come from.
- Number sequence and order, place value, fractions, basic facts, and algebra are taught in two week blocks. Currently the two weeks are consecutive weeks. Preferably the weeks would be separated to encourage retention. This will happen from T3, when my new co-teacher has developed some familiarity with the programme.
- strategy covers add/sub, mult/div, proportions/ratios, as Gloss (assessment) divides them.
- proportions and ratios are taught more than the others due to it being the focus as decided by the Senior Management Team. Preferably I would make sure add/sub and mult/div are understood completely before teaching prop/rat, but that's not how the NZ maths curriculum works.
- skills and knowledge across the board were low
- division of groups based on overall level was not targeting students precisely enough.
- retention was poor
- many students with capable skills were testing low, with our hunch being they didn't understand the problems.
- our subsequent decisions were: to look more closely at the data to target specific weak areas for each student, specifically in strand, to continually and repeatedly cover all knowledge, and to develop comprehension of maths problems and thinking skills to solve them.
- finding weak areas in strand and teaching it over protracted periods is an attempt to boost strand knowledge
- repeatedly covering all areas of knowledge is to build retention
- to improve maths problem comprehension, we developed our "Reciprocal Maths" programme, which we haven't had a good run at due to Covid.
