Recently I’ve approached my teaching with a renewed focus – part of this stems from the fact that the teaching is the part of the job I really love. The main driver though is a quest to understand common misconceptions as I’ve been thinking about where they fit in my chain of thought when it comes to planning and delivering lessons – I have to admit that when I started teaching I may have refrained from labouring the point within a lesson for fear of students remembering the wrong information. I think this was part of the whole “they aren’t listening to me” thing and lack of confidence in my ability in the very early days of teaching.

Coincidentally I got speaking to Robert Wilne at the NCETM and they have a regular article in the secondary magazine that he thought would be a useful forum for sharing real-life actual misconceptions and I’ve agreed to share what I find in my day job. Interestingly the second one was “frequency trees” – many of us said they would cause confusion with probability trees so just imagine my surprise when I found the below (say that with a tone of irony in your voice to get an idea of how I’m saying it!) .. the same thing was seen from lots of students!!  Let’s just say that I’m not convinced that teaching frequency trees and linking them to probability trees works …

Anyway the point is … keep an eye out for any interesting “workings” from your students. I’d be really interested in them … additionally you may want to send a copy (ideally, about 1-2Mb) to the NCETM team at info@ncetm.org.uk with ‘Secondary Magazine Eyes Down’ in the email subject line. Include a note of where and when it was taken, and any comments on it you may have. If your picture is published, they’ll send you a £20 voucher.