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33 M AT H S teachwire.net/secondary ABOUT THE AUTHOR Richard Coles is an assistant director of sixth form at Brockhill Park Performing Arts College and an experienced head of maths; follow him at @richardcoles10 confident are you that the formulas you use are the same as those taught by your science colleagues? It may be worth investigating this, both to maintain consistency and avoid student confusion between subjects. I have personally used both methods, and found that students with lower attainment are more successful when using formula triangles. A personal favourite of mine is teaching the acronym ‘Don’t Squash Turtles’ – cheap chuckles from the pupils, but they remember it and get the order correct. I first saw a colleague using this in 2010 and have never looked back since. Returning to our question, can your pupils convert minutes to decimal form? Have they practised this as an explicit skill prior to being given the AO2-style question? Also, consider again what tier 2 words might need addressing. Do your students understand the concept of ‘average speed’? Have you sequenced the learning within your curriculum to ensure that averages were delivered in advance of teaching speed / distance / time? Make the link between the two explicit. Underselling our pupils Let’s look a final example, AO3, taken from the 2019 international exam specification: You often hear the word ‘acre’ when farmers are talking about the size of their farms. Farmer Giles likes to think of himself as a modern farmer. He says that his farm teachwire.net/ compoundmeasure DOWNLOAD a FREE ‘Compound Measures’ worksheet and presentation to accompany this article at occupies an area of 1,011,750m² – that’s one million, eleven thousand, seven hundred and fifty square meters. But Farmer Morris is still a bit old-fashioned. He says that his farm, which occupies 250 acres, is larger than Farmer Giles’s farm. If one acre is equivalent to an area of 4,047m², whose farm is larger? How many of your pupils would simply skip this question altogether due to its wording? Can they extract the key information? A task that I’ve found effective is for pupils to redact the text and then see what information helps. As with AO1 and AO2, it’s essential that pupils understand in advance not only the technical vocabulary of tier 3, but also the tier 2 words within the questions. This specific wording may be unlikely to appear as GCSE question, but we undersell our pupils if we don’t cover questions of this type because they don’t employ the exact same wording as the specification. Pupils are still being called on to demonstrate the same mathematical skills required for conversion, but with deeper contextual understanding. In my opinion, the development of these overall skills is more important, and certainly more beneficial for later life, than simply satisfying the exam requirements.