[MUSIC PLAYING] INSTRUCTOR: So I'm going to show you a kind of case study really for the
next few minutes. This is the school Gumley House where I used to teach.
And what we did in Year 7 was we had a collaboration with someone called Jo Boaler.
I'm not sure if anyone knows Jo Boaler, but she was very big in kind of independent learning.
And she did a lot of work in the States, but then she started working at-- well,
she was working at, I think it was Brighton University. I hope I didn't get that wrong.
Certainly down on the South Coast. And she came to Gumley and had a chat with me.
And what we did was we looked at the Year 7 curriculum,
and we rewrote it in projects to get that kind of primary school enthusiasm going. And so we wrote
these projects. The only one-- We wrote them for about a year before we started using them.
The only one we kind of nicked was one from Kangaroo Maths, which was the Maths Magic one.
We adapted that one, but the rest of them were kind of written in-house.
So I'm just going to explain that these are saved in the Google Drive if you're interested.
Again, this is a big investment, but it might be something that if you have a
year group out for a couple of weeks you could give them part of the projects.
And what you're doing is you're using maths to solve one big problem under a theme.
So it was a themed approach. So this is the project. So we had a Transitional
Statistics one that we started with. And what happened was the teacher owned the project
and we carouseled the students. We were toying with the idea of doing mixed ability, but we kept
them in sets. Obviously, there's bubbles now if you're going to take these on or use one of them.
And what happened was that the teacher owned the project,
and then they'd have to differentiate it for the different sets. So we had a kind of
set one version, set two, set three, set four. So obviously we had to push the bright top sets,
so these projects are made for all the different-- Someone's saying about Dan
Meyer there, which is really good. I remember the one with the water going in.
Jo Boaler. That's right. Sorry. Correction, it's Jo Boaler Sorry, I said that wrong.
Anyway, so what happened was we did these projects, and
we have tests. So if you actually go into the drive, what you'll see is you'll see all of
them there. You'll see a scheme of work with hyperlinks, and then there's an assessment for
each project as well. But the assessment is a kind of-- it just looks like a maths test,
but all the skills coming out of it came from applying the skills for a particular context here.
So let me just show you what a student produced. This student-- One of the projects was called Life
in 3D. And we gave them multi-link cubes, and we started them with three cubes and then four cubes
and five cubes and they had to build different types of flats and accommodation. And they had to
do an estate agent brochure for it, and they had to do the front-- Because a lot of estate agents'
pricing is based on the number of square meters of floor space. And that was just an example of one.
And then you've got your 3D work coming in there and some money work. So this is just an example.
The Maths Magic one had like magic tricks, but the maths behind them used algebra, things like double
brackets. So the top set were able to actually complete the square and do double brackets to
find out how the project worked. So there's all sorts of things. The one with the statistics,
we actually got the top set to do box plots, and things like this. So that was one thing.
They're quite open in a sense, but kind of scary for some teachers to deliver because
it was very open. The first year we did it, we did half the year groups-- we had
half-year groups-- one half-year group used the projects and the other half-year group didn't,
because we wanted to trial them. And we gave the two half-year groups the same test at the
beginning and at the end of the year to see what difference the projects made.
And what we found was the top sets were virtually the same results, because bright kids are bright
kids, and the bottom sets virtually got the same results. But what it did was it made those
middle groups go up. And we followed some of those classes through-- we only did the projects in Year
7-- and it did improve-- The half-year group that did the project, they actually got slightly better
GCSE results five years later in that middle band. So it was kind of effective in that way.