Thetford
Teachers had been using ‘If I know ‘8 + 3 =11’ what else do I know? And ‘What went wrong?’ This has improved children’s vocabulary, conversation, reasoning, collaboration and confidence to speak out in class.
Having 3 different statements to discuss was also useful as well as just one statement to disagree or agree with. The odd one out was used a lot to start maths lessons.
Convince another student was very successful and, as with all the question templates, could be used at any point in a lesson to assess current understanding.
We used our starter questions in history to build towards our final task – a debate about whether it was better to go to school today or in the past. Each lesson started with a review of vocabulary and then with ‘Convince me’ questions (e.g. Convince your partner that a dip pen is better than a pencil or a radiator is better than a coal stove) this gave them a good understanding of the vocabulary and practise with the sentence stems needed for their debate at the end of the unit.
Katie, Year 2
Last lesson, last week, last term short recap questions had been used at start of every maths lesson by most teachers.