One thing I found most beneficial as a new teacher was being in a department that readily shared good practice.
In each department meeting, members of the team were encouraged to bring something to share: an idea, a starter, a problem or a question. This practice continued outside lessons; resources were continually shared over conversations at lunchtime, during breaks or after school. As a newly qualified teacher I quickly picked up much from my more experienced peers.
In time, these resources were mapped to our scheme of work, often accompanied by a ‘serving suggestion’: approaches that had worked previously, and so became much more than just a resource. This experience has stayed with me throughout my career and was what I missed the most when working in a school where collaborative planning was harder to instigate.
It was therefore a nice surprise when a colleague came to me excitedly with a ‘new’ problem. After the initial explanation, from somewhere in my memory came the feeling I had seen this before… “Wait, wait, it makes a sequence doesn’t it? One that resets? I has something to do with binary? Powers of two?” I had seen the same investigation at my first school. Unfortunately, I think this ‘burst his bubble’. It did, however get me thinking: “What other gems that have slipped my mind since I started teaching?”
Fortunately I have my trusty external hard drive on which I have saved hundreds of worksheets, schemes of work, web links, applets, presentations and assessments, categorised (some existing in two, three or four different folders) and taken from school to school. For some reason, instead of combing through this decade’s worth of collected digital resources, I always seem to attempt to reinvent the wheel for the next lesson, scouring online for a suitable resource, or creating my own from scratch. There are so many resources on my hard drive that I can’t find anything useful that quickly.
Recently, I have found a solution. I start my search for resources at the Secondary mathematics resource package page. This resource package contains a selection of hand-picked resources covering all the statements in the new Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4 mathematics programmes of study. If you are thinking of resourcing your department scheme of work, this page can provide a useful starting point.
Even better, the resourcing the new secondary mathematics curriculum CPD has more information and advice about making the most of the wealth of resources freely available in the National STEM Learning Centre resource collection. But what makes the STEM website different to all the others is the ability to create your very own, tailor made resource packages containing all your resources together with your suggestions as to how the resources can be used in the classroom. These collections can be linked to your scheme of work so you need never lose a resource ever again.