Craig Barton interviews guests from the wonderful world of education about their approaches to teaching, educational research and more. All show notes, resources and videos here: https://www.mrbartonmaths.com/blog/
Jo Morgan (@mathsjem) and I spent four days at the BCME conference in April of 2018, and decided to record a podcast each night – it sounded a good idea at the time. Hear our thoughts on all things from variation, manipulatives, A Level teaching, tough GCSE questions, pub quizzes and Hannah Fry…
For more information about today’s guest, plus links to the websites, resources and ideas they mention, please visit the show notes page: http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/blog/conference-takeaways-bcme-day-1/
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Mr Barton Maths Podcast, with me Craig Barton.
This podcast comes live from the end of Day 1 at the BCME Maths Conference 2018. It is recorded with my co-host Jo Morgan (@mathsjem on Twitter and the creator of the online bible of maths resources, resourceaholic.com) . This episode we discuss:
1. How the flipping heck do you pronounce BCME?
2. David Spiegelhalter’s keynote address about probability
3. Anne Watson’s session on Variation
4. Jo’s very own session that she will be presenting on Thursday
5. What we are looking forward to tomorrow
Below are some photos from the exercises in Anne’s session that we discuss on the podcast, and the hand-outs from the session can be found here: pmtheta.com/publications.html
Please note that the substitution activity below, and which Jo and I discuss on the show, is from one of Tony Gardiner’s Extension maths books.
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Thanks so much for listening, and I really hope you enjoy the show!
Craig Barton
Thank you for the podcast,.
I wonder if a listener might construe from your conversation about Anne’s session that she was *advocating for* any of these exercises? I suspect that she was not?
The questions you have, Jo, about pattern-filling, get to the heart of issues about designing tasks using ‘Variation’, whatever that might mean. And Craig, your “controversial” point about variation is an interesting revelation. Some variation worksheets seem similar to ten ticks worksheets, but with less variety.
It was also interesting to me that you both ‘liked’ the algebraic exercise. Why? What awarenesses might a learner gain through doing this exercise? Of course, this depends on the learner, so perhaps it’s more fruitful to ask: what was the intention of the person who designed this exercise, implicit in its design?
Related to this: the fact that you are left with more questions than answers may have been the intention in Anne’s design of this session, through *her* use of variation in the exercises she presented?
Thanks for the podcast,
Danny