#013 Jamie Frost – Dr Frost Maths and Teaching High Achievers

Craig Barton
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On this episode of the Mr Barton Maths Podcast I spoke to Jamie Frost.

Jamie is a maths teacher at the high-achieving Tiffin School, and the creator of the amazing Dr Frost Maths.

When I say Tiffin is high-achieving, I really do mean, high-achieving. To put this into context, Jamie would expect around half of his bottom set Year 11s to achieve an A* grade, which just about put them on a par with our top set! But this context lead to a fascinating conversation about how to challenge these high achieving students, which I hope is something all teachers will find interesting and useful.

In a wide ranging interview, we covered the following things:

  • How does Jamie use the categories of Structure, Exposition, Assessment and Differentiation to help plan his lessons?
  • What teaching gimmicks does Jamie not like?
  • Why is thinking through the sequence of lessons so important, and what does the Tiffin maths scheme of work look like?
  • How does Jamie make use of past UKMT maths challenge questions within his lessons, together with skill check questions?
  • Jamie talks us through a bad lesson he has delivered and what he learned from it
  • We discuss if it is easier to teach high achieving students than low achieving students, and whether Jamie would consider working at a more traditional comprehensive
  • We uncover a form of differentiation that is necessary when working with high achieving students that is not commonly discussed
  • Jamie explains why he feels it is vitally important that students learn to internalise concepts in mathematics, and he illustrates this concept with some really interesting examples
  • We look at the process of resource creation
  • What are Jamie’s future plans for his site?
  • Jamie shares some really valuable tips and advice which are aimed at trainee teachers and NQTs, but which will ring true for so many teachers, including myself
  • Why Jamie would advise all maths teachers to try tutoring

Jamie is engaging, and his approaches are carefully considered and thought-provoking. I hope you agree that this is another engaging, worthwhile listen.

Jamie’s website is: http://drfrostmaths.com/ 

On Twitter he is @DrFrostMaths

Jamie’s Big 3
1. mrbartonmaths (very kind, and I promise no money changed hands for this recommendation. Well, not much money, any way)
2. resourceaholic
3. ukmt and free past maths challenge questions

Podcast Puzzle
“Bob the Postman has 5 letters to deliver, one to each of 5 houses. How many ways are there are of Bob delivering the letters so that no one gets the correct letter?” 

My usual plugs:

Thanks so much for listening, and I really hope you enjoy the show!
Craig Barton

6 thoughts on “#013 Jamie Frost – Dr Frost Maths and Teaching High Achievers”

  1. Hi,

    I’m trying to solve the podcast puzzle and possibly work out a formula for other numbers of houses/letters.

    Firstly is the solution 44/120? Secondly is there a formula?

    Kind regards

    Matthew Smyth

  2. brilliant podcast. I am an advanced skills teacher..made me reflective, particularly about the quiet struggling student and teachers subject knowledge

  5. You went even further and worked out the probability! But yes, 44 is the answer. One Year 9 student at my school came up with a particularly good method: to divide up the 5 people into groups each of at least 2 people (which could be just one group of 5), then there’s (n-1)! ways within each group of n. This article explains the problem, as well as giving you both a term-to-term recurrence but also an awesomely simple position-to-term formula: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derangement

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