Maths4Life
Oonagh Gormley
Date: Tuesday 6th March
Venue: Northern College, Barnsley
The workshop will be a hands-on introduction to the work of the Maths4Life project. You will have the opportunity to try out materials produced to support an active learning approach to Teaching and Learning at Entry Level and Level 1 and discuss the implications for yourself and your learners in working this way
Oonagh is the Maths4Life Project Manager at the National Research and Development Centre, based at the Institute of Education, London. She taught mathematics for ten years in secondary schools and in teacher training. She then worked within the Risk Management department of a major bank building credit scoring models, and was Director of Administration in the School of Social Sciences at City University, London, for over eight years. More recently she spent several months crossing Canada.
Some comments from delegates attending Oonagh's workshop at the NANAMIC summer conference:
After my minor epiphany during Malcolm Swan’s address in the morning, my conversion to the ‘new approach’ to teaching was further cemented at the Maths 4 Life session led by Helen Jarvis and Oonagh Gormley.
Encouraging their participants to take part in the manner to which they should be becoming accustomed, they highlighted the importance of Malcolm’s principles to teaching Numeracy and non-specialist maths. They quite rightly pointed out that practitioners in Skills for Life had probably been adopting these principles more than their ‘normal maths’ colleagues for many years, so the shift should not be as seismic for them.
The forthcoming ‘Thinking through Mathematics’ product will apply and illuminate these principles as they relate to Entry Level and Level 1 learners. Oonagh and Helen demonstrated questioning techniques involving floppy (and miraculously cheap) whiteboards, and followed these with an infinitely versatile washing line exercise.
The two key messages I took away were; ‘do less but do it more thoroughly’ and ‘hold your nerve, it WILL work’ – a challenge which will keep me thinking through those dark days of lesson planning!
Further information can be found on the website www.nanamic.org.uk
or from
Lesley Way, NANAMIC Administrator and Conference Organiser,