Craig Barton interviews guests from the wonderful world of education about their approaches to teaching, educational research and more. All show notes, resources and videos here: https://www.mrbartonmaths.com/blog/
Chris is a former head of mathematics in Scotland who now works for La Salle education. Like me, he has undergone something of a mid-career crises when he started to engage in educational research. However, we have reached slightly different conclusions in a number of key areas. In this conversation we delve deep into those areas, as well as discussing how to create or choose a good mathematical task.
For more information about today’s guest, plus links to the websites, resources and ideas they mention, please visit the show notes page: http://www.mrbartonmaths.com/blog/chris-mcgrane-task-design-and-changing-your-mind/
On this episode of the Mr Barton Maths Podcast I spoke to Chris McGrane.
Chris is a former Principal Teacher of Maths up in sunny Scotland, and is now the Maths Lead in Scotland for La Salle Education. Now, long-time listeners will have heard Chris’ dulcet tones on a the researchEd Scotland Conference Takeaways podcast last year.
I am a huge fan of Chris. As I have mentioned previously on this podcast, Chris is a brilliant user of Twitter to pull in views on his ideas from a wide-range of practitioners. Like me, he has undergone something of a transformation in his teaching and thinking about learning, but we have gone off in slightly different directions, which hopefully makes for an interesting conversation.
So, in a wide ranging challenging and fascinating conversation, Chris and I discussed the following things, and plenty more besides:
- Chris describes his favourite failure, and what he learned from the experience
- Chris gives us an overview into how his approach to teaching has changed and why
- Then we go deep into task design, with Chris describing how his approach to both creating tasks and choosing tasks to use has changed
- Chris then takes us through 3 of his favourite tasks, describing why he likes them and how he uses them. And images of these tasks are available in the show notes so you can play along at home
- We then turn our attention to the importance of classroom talk, and how as teachers we can help our students get better at conversing
And then it all kicks off as we discuss a few things that we may well disagree on, including atomisation and minimally different problems
I loved this conversation. I find it fascinating to speak to someone who has been teaching roughly the same time as me and who has undergone similar journey in terms of their ignorance of educational research, and yet we have reached slightly different conclusions. And I will be reflecting on these differences in the Takeaway section at the end of this episode.
On Twitter, Chris is: @ChrisMcGrane84
Chris blogs at: chrismcgrane.blogspot.com
His website is: startingpointsmaths.blogspot.com
Chris McGrane’s Big 3
1. Thinking mathematically – John Mason
2. Median by Don Steward
3. STEM website
The tasks we discussed:
From Chris:
From John Mason
From NRICH:
From me 🙂
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Thanks so much for listening, and I really hope you enjoy the show!
Craig Barton