Inspiring teachers to make the most of maths

Recent research by Ofsted shows students, particularly those in secondary schools, are turned off by rote learning in mathematics and draws attention to the need for more inspiring lessons. The aim of this week's Teacher Inspiration Day, the second in a series of three during this academic year, is to support mathematics teachers who are committed to nurturing confident, resourceful and enthusiastic learners.

The workshop forms part of a $1.2m three-year mathematics programme, funded by the Goldman Sachs Foundation and run by the University of Cambridge's NRICH Mathematics Project, part of the Millennium Mathematics Project. The programme targets both students and teachers.

The Fast Forward Mathematics residential programme will be offered to three cohorts of London students while they are in Year 10 (aged 14-15). It is the first time Cambridge has run a subject-specific residential programme over such a lengthy period. It is being run by two award-winning divisions of the University of Cambridge: the NRICH Project, that has been providing free on-line mathematics enrichment resources for over a decade, and the Group to Encourage Ethnic Minority Applications (GEEMA), which is part of the Widening Participation Team in the Cambridge Admissions Office.

The series of three separate Teacher Inspiration Days will each address a different theme:

Enriching resources, inspiring learners
Enriching classrooms, inspiring learning
Enriching networks, inspiring teachers

By working with both students and teachers, the aim is to have a sustained impact on the educational experience of current and future students.

Today's Teacher Inspiration Day offers teachers an opportunity to consider how to develop:

Positive attitudes towards mathematics and learning mathematics
Confident learners who are able to work independently and willing to take risks
Good communicators – good at listening, speaking and working purposefully in groups
Students who have appropriate strategies when they get stuck
Lessons that maintain the complexity whilst making the mathematics accessible
Students’ ability to make connections
Critical learners who value and utilise differences

This will build on the first Teacher Inspiration Day held in October when teachers had an opportunity to work with some of the innovative and creative mathematics resources that are freely available on the NRICH website.

Comments from that day show some of the difficulties mathematics teachers face.

One teacher wrote: "How can I force or provoke a thinking response before the student says "I don't get it..."?

Another said: "They want to be machines - I want them to think."

"Is there enough time to fit these activities into the curriculum?" asked another, while one teacher spoke of his difficulties in countering other teachers' perceptions that the kind of challenging, interesting problems produced by the NRICH Project were not "proper mathematics".

Charlie Gilderdale, the Programme Director, is excited by the opportunities that these extended projects offer: "It's important that students leave school having encountered more than just 'textbook mathematics'. The NRICH Project aims to complement what textbooks offer. We are keen to see students develop their mathematical thinking and problem-solving skills so we offer thought-provoking, engaging problems that can usually be solved in a variety of ways, and often require students to conjecture, explain, generalise, justify and prove. We'd like all students to experience and appreciate the power and excitement of mathematical thinking."

Stephanie Bell-Rose, President of The Goldman Sachs Foundation, said: "The Goldman Sachs Foundation supports initiatives that give promising young people from underserved backgrounds access to programs that will help them develop the academic and leadership skills needed to succeed in leading universities and, ultimately, in their careers. Quantitative skills are critical to their educational and professional success. We are pleased to support this effort to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics in the United Kingdom."