I thoroughly enjoyed Craig Barton's book, ‘How I wish I'd Taught Maths‘. To my mind, it's an absolute must-read for any maths teacher out there. It has chapters on how students learn, motivation, explicit instruction, cognitive load theory, self-explanations, how to structure instruction, feedback, classroom culture, and much, much more. It collates a lot of fantastic research in one place, and presents it alongside detailed explanations of how to use it in the classroom.

Below I've included a bunch of my favourite snippets from the book. My absolute faves are marked with an asterisk *at the start and at the end*.

Enjoy : )

Let them see that you love maths

Making mistakes doesn't grow your brain

‘It's kind of hard to have a growth mindset when I keep doing shit on tests, sir'

What to do when a student says ‘I can't do it.'

Instruction during intervention should be explicit and systematic

How to teach negative numbers!

How before why: A good chapter to read in staff meeting

CLT in three key points

Could we try making a normal problem into a goal free one?

Explaining to a friend imposes more cognitive load than self-explaining

*The counter of hope*

Break large tasks down into sub-goals

Scaffold non-examples for struggling students by pointing out the error

Include boundary examples (and variation more generally) right from the beginning of instruction

Students shouldn't be able to get the question right whilst still holding a misconception

*Minimally different examples are cool*

*A refinement regarding how to use Desmos sliders*

Incorrect answers are really dangerous

Resource: AQA Questions and solutions

*Ask students the questions you'd like them to learn to ask themselves (+ Schoenfeldt's Qs)*

Colin Foster has developed a taxonomy for maths Qs

No opt-out works because students learn that ‘I don't know' is going to lead to just as much work

Definitions of retrieval and storage strengths, + considerations regarding interactions

Resource: UK Maths trust and Mr. Taylor's ‘increasingly difficult questions', great worksheets

Interleaving: mini-blocks and blocked-to-interleaved just as effective

Resource: UK Maths challenge questions (a database)

self-grading is much more effective than peer-grading

Resource: Websites for making quizzes

Note, Ben Gordon (@mathsmrgordon) has collated a bunch of these resources in one place, here:

pre-tests are highly effective

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