Differentiation – A Dirty Word?

Well, I've had a pretty good weekend so far! I always work Friday mornings so off I went nice and early as I had some things to get done before a meeting that had been booked in for me at 11. 11am arrived and instead of being greeted by visitors I was shown a video of my two year old telling me I had to come home so Daddy could take me to the hotel! Pretty shocked, I packed up my laptop and went home to start packing! We stayed at a lovely hotel in Harrogate and had a kid-free 24 hours! I know some of you will get how amazing this is! About a month ago, we had a pretty upsetting time at work and so this was to make us both feel better! Shout out to Lisa for babysitting!

Differentiation - A Dirty Word?

We've been talking a lot about differentiation recently with everyone's 'expert' views banded around on Twitter, praising or slating the everyday teacher (usually when they didn't even want to be thrust into the limelight). Sian's put together a blog post to share our thoughts on the matter in relation to our resources.

I'm so excited to announce TWO new lines of resources for Small Steps Maths! You'll see some new resources lurking around at the top of the resources section below. These are Homework/Extension tasks and Discussion Problems. I'll be doing a Facebook Live later today to show you inside them in more detail and answer your questions, but in short, the Homework/Extension resources give you choice of more questions to send home or give out in the lesson (perhaps the level higher knowing the questions are completely different) and the discussion problems are complex non-differentiated problems designed to be tackled in pairs or a small group for deeper learning. We'll be adding these new resource lines for EVERY small step in Maths over the next year AND... there's something else exciting on the way too!

You may already know, but I'm currently running a campaign at the moment to get 20,000 responses to our #LIFEworkbalance survey. I just don't feel that anything that has been done before has been taken seriously and acted upon - maybe because they use sample sizes of 400 teachers? Anyway, I REALLY need your help with this to get it out there to as many school staff as possible. I am wanting to go BIG with this (knocking on 10 Downing Street with it if I have to) because I am really fed up of the lip service we as a profession have to accept. We even have an incentive on at the moment where you can win a hoodie if you share a picture of yourself doing something non-work related and share our survey. The original Facebook post has all the information you need. We're nearly ready to start sending the hoodies out so don't miss out on your chance to get one!

Nicola is joining our proofreading team tomorrow so that's exciting - seriously, there's a new face in the office every week! If you want to get in on our massive recruitment drive, then make sure you apply for one of our jobs!

Mothers' Day is coming up shortly so check out all the great resources we already have online for you.

This has been a very long email, so I'm off now and I'll see you later on Facebook to tell you about our new resource lines!