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This year long project was a continution of a pilot which initially involved six primary schools in the Brighton and Hove area. In the autumn of 2010 two or more teachers from sixteen different primary schools met with Liz and Lynne for a day, to do maths together and discuss and plan how to embed 'low threshold high ceiling' tasks into ordinary lessons.
The aims of the project were:
*to understand what is meant by the phrase 'low threshold high ceiling activities' and know what these look like in practice
*to understand how appropriate questioning can change closed questions into low threshold high ceiling activities
*to further understand the importance of maths talk and know how to promote this in the classroom
*to identify opportunities to insert low threshold high ceiling activities into current planning documents
*to work with school colleagues on coming to a whole school understanding.
In the spring term Liz and Lynne visited each school to support the teachers in whatever way they thought most useful. This was through facilitating a planning session, offering a CPD session to the rest of the staff, teaching a class or group of children and then discussing it with observing teachers, observing a lesson and feeding back, or a mixture of these.
At the end of the year everyone met up again for a day to share successes and challenges and to plan next steps.
You can see what activities we used in the project here.
Here are some comments made by the participating teachers:
"Great modelled questioning."
"Thank you for the opportunity to learn by doing!"
"It has been really enjoyable and has had a positive impact on my teaching and the children's learning."
"Thank you for a really useful project which has inspired everyone at our school."
"An outstanding course which encourages dialogue between teachers, allowing us to use the very best resources we have between us."
"Great course - have got an enourmous amount out of it and been able to share and implement in school with eager colleagues."
"This has been amazing and really changed the way I teach."