NRICH Workshop - By Mykhailo Bratyk
Director of NRICH, Dr Ems Lord delivered a really inspiring session that made everybody take a look at their future job of Maths teacher from a slightly different point of view. She opened a real treasury of fantastic tools developed by NRICH, which we can use for free to make our lessons highly engaging.
First of all, she made us think of what we consider to be the final product of our teaching. We cannot be satisfied just with good grades received by our pupils at GCSE exams. Sometimes even after successfully passing GCSE Maths a pupil can say: “I don’t want to have anything to do with Maths ever in the future”. We need to help them not only to learn Maths but to enjoy it. And that difference in pupils’ attitudes towards Maths we can make with a proper selection of problems for our lessons.
It can take a lot of time for a teacher to design the problems that can really engage students in learning maths. I consider such problems to be precious like gems. NRICH resources are full of such gems for different parts of the curriculum and different levels of difficulty. During this session we were able to delve into this treasure trove, and learn how to make effective use of the gems inside.
Personally, I was very fascinated while some problems were discussed. One of them included graphs about Olympic records which showed data points, but no labels on the axes. We were asked to answer what Olympic event that graph is about. But the most interesting thing was not in the correct answer itself but in the story that graph can tell us behind the data and even behind the gaps in the data. We traveled a century-long journey, learning about the impact that historical events - such as the World Wars -had on the Olympics. Such problems can involve everybody in the class in interesting discussion and reasoning no matter what you are mostly interested in - sports, history or anything else. These are the problems you continue thinking over even after solving it. And you long for your next lesson for one more such a gem.
A very good suggestion was given to discuss with other subject teachers the points of intersection of Maths and other subjects. Why not even present some lessons together? It can show the pupils various cross-subject connections.
Dr Lord underpinned that we want to nurture resilient Mathematicians. Even if we can’t connect their future life or job with Maths, we want them to leave school enjoying the subject.
She stressed that we want our pupils to be not only those who can solve a problem but those who can pose a problem. Some strategies were introduced for how we can encourage them to be problem posers. For example, we can take away all the text from a geometric problem and leave just a diagram, and then ask pupils to guess what the question is. Similarly, we can give all the conditions of an algebraic problem, without the final question, and then discuss with our pupils what the question could be asking us to find.
It was pointed out how important it is to celebrate pupils work. Publishing their solutions on the NRICH website is one way to do this.
NRICH not only gives the opportunity for teachers to use ready-made tasks but also contains resources for pupils and parents.
Finally, Dr Ems Lord shared the 10-10-10 principle for how to take action after being inspired at an event such as this. Pick 3 actions which will have the biggest impact for your pupils in the next year. Aim to complete the first action within 10 days, the second within 10 weeks, and the third within 10 months. Setting realistic targets like this makes it more likely we will meet our goals, and our pupils and colleagues will feel the benefit!
By Mykhailo Bratyk
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