I agreed to get involved with the GLOW hub GCSE working party, looking at the new GCSE with other teachers (you may have seen the exam questions by topic I put together as part of this?); on Friday we had our second meeting and a few things came out of it:

• We were looking at the “language of exams” in the context of the new GCSE (Dave Bowman is doing some fab work pulling together some definitions of key words) and I agreed to pull together a poster as a quick win of the other ways of saying “just do the flipping maths” … we’ve all had students that don’t even attempt a question because it said “express” rather than “write down” or “work out”. The idea is that it’s a collection of command words that are not topic specific, which is why we’ve not included words like “simplify” or “expand” as we’re hoping to include some resources for that in the next phase. This was a really interesting exercise to do as we sat and read out the command words from some of the SAMs and it was evident that lots of Edexcels questions start with “write down” which I quite liked as it is really evident what is required to be done. The file for the poster is here -> Do the Maths poster

• Solutions for the exam questions by topic – this is the bit where I’m asking YOU to get involved. I am looking for some support in putting together worked solutions – there are about 185-190 files with  questions from the SAMs split into topic areas and if you have the means to annotate solutions could you consider working through some questions? (I use notability on my iPad linked to my Dropbox so I can import and export PDFs but you could print and scan/email your solutions to me if you’re “old skool”). So far I’ve listed the algebra and geometry documents on the below spreadsheet and will put a shout out for the other topic areas later this week …
  

This is a great exercise to familiarise yourself with the style of questions on the new GCSEs – if you are up for this please indicate which solutions you’d like to do on this spreadsheet -> SPREADSHEET Some of the questions appear on the Higher and the Foundation tiers so will appear in multiple documents – so it would make sense for you to do the multiple solution sets for a topic. ANY HELP WOULD BE GRATEFULLY RECEIVED.

Finally our next working party meeting is after our current year 11 exams – it is pencilled in for the 1st July and usually runs 12 to 3pm – keep an eye open for details of how to book your place. The more the merrier!!