Episode description

Femi and Matt speak to Dave Taylor on the topic of the maths curriculum.  Dave is a maths specialist and lead practioner, well known in maths circles for his ‘increasingly difficult questions’ and ‘backward faded maths’.  Dave has thought long and hard about curriculum issues such as sequencing and mastery, and has experience of creating maths curricula, so the trio go deep on the considerations, nuances and complexities of developing and implementing an effective maths curriculum.

Topics covered include:
-The value of having schemes of work
-The fact that students don’t come into Y7 all at the same starting point, and the implications of this
-Streaming and Pathways
-Mastering material that is prerequisite to moving on
-Setting, setting philosophy and setting conversations
-Resources, and issues with centrally prepared lessons
-Space and flexibility in the scheme work to do retrieval work, fill gaps, or push ahead
-Designing a scheme of work that maximises students’ opportunity to succeed by accounting for their starting points
-Importance of testing students on what they have been taught and the stupidity and cruelty of giving students summative assessments that contain topics that they have not yet covered.
-The domain-specificity of teacher expertise, why it is hard to develop and some possibilities for doing that better
-And Increasingly difficult questions, amongst other topics

You can follow Dave on X @taylorda01, and listen to his own podcast here:
https://taylorda01.weebly.com/podcast.html