In order to gain an extra day's holiday in the summer we postponed an INSET day to several twilight sessions. This evening was the first of these and was based on Teaching and Learning - which might sound obvious but it's amazing how often teacher's overlook this as an idea in itself. The model for it CREPE, which stands for Challenge, Risk-taking, Engagement, Progess and Enjoyment. In short the five things that our lessons should involve, leading to lots of jokes that the evening was going to be crepe or that it's all a load of crepe etc... We can be a cynical bunch, us teachers.
I quite enjoy such sessions as we invariably get to try out lots of different activities and I sometimes come away with lots of good ideas. I do have some reservations though as the big movers in Teaching and Learning at our school are based in the humanities department, so we had lots of quite wooly ideas that don't necessarily translate well into the maths classroom. For example in one activity we were shown a picture and had to come up with answers to: Who? What? Why? Where? When? It's the sort of 'In my opinion...' approach that doesn't work when the answer is sixteen.
Some of the other maths teachers are quite grumpy about such evenings as they hate being told how to do their job. My own view is that we should use any good ideas but not stress too much about doing things for the sake of of fitting some criteria.
My 'highlight' of the evening was being put on the spot by the school's Teaching and Learning coach. We were shown a picture of a banana and had to come up with two questions to which 'banana' was the answer, one low order (name a yellow fruit) and one high order (name a fruit high in potassium, or as one teacher suggested: complete the film title 'Herbie goes...') When put on the spot to say a question though I struggled to think in front of over a hundred teachers and support staff and came out with 'what is, er, that a picture of?' which got a laugh at least. It'll make me think very carefully about my questioning technique in the classroom as I couldn't concentrate for the next five minutes. I now understand why some pupils look daggers at me when I ask them even the most straightforward of questions.
