Teaching English and Maths in FE

What works for vocational learners?

David Allan, Author

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781473992795, 9781473992788
• eBook ISBN: 9781526414595
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teacher Training

This book is a guide for all teachers in the FE and Skills Sector, regardless of their discipline. It explores how FE teachers can address the mathematics and English needs of all learners, to redress the skills gap that is a current focus. The text explores what works in the sector, examining the barriers to learning and how all learners can be included. It takes a focused look at what works for the vocational learners who have not succeeded in a school setting, and helps tackle the problem of low motivation in learners.

The text goes beyond simply providing strategies to follow and includes background theory and detailed case studies to enhance your understanding of different approaches. 

1 Incorporating English and Maths

This Chapter

This chapter explores the incorporation of maths and English in all teaching areas. It focuses on key features of embedding and the need to enthuse learners by drawing on personal goals to ensure learning is both relevant and inspirational. The chapter provides an overview of what is required to successfully embed English and maths for your learners.

This chapter supports you to:

• Get to know your students.
• Identify aspects of English and maths and emphasise what your students can do.
• Build on students' strengths and utilise their ambitions and personal interests.
• Support and praise.
• Build confidence and self-esteem.
• Be inclusive.
• Identify areas for improvement.
• Build on experience.

Get to Know your Students

Knowing your students is essential for good teaching and this knowledge is a key feature of planning. You may have a scheme of work in place, you may have detailed lesson plans to accompany every session, but you will still need to adapt these plans as you get to know who you are teaching (and why) and what their strengths and weaknesses are. Does a certain student scream and run out of the classroom when you mention fractions, for instance? Or break down in tears when they attempt them? These examples may sound extreme but they are taken from real-life events. You will therefore need to at least have a basic awareness of what is going on in your students' lives, and how this can impact on their learning. This does not mean prying into their personal life, of course; rather, it is about getting to know how you can help them to develop in the most efficacious manner. For instance, can you use their experiences to develop the embedding process? Consider the following example:

Ranjit regularly writes for a blog on his favourite subject: magic. He is a part-time magician and a member of his local magic circle.

Can you use this information to bring a little magic to your lesson? (Pun intended.) The internet will be helpful here if you wish to seek out a magical number trick (or ask Ranjit to prepare one). You may find one that appears to draw on probability (but actually works every time), whereupon you can explore this further. Moreover, could Ranjit be asked to work collaboratively with other students? Would he mind writing about his experience of mixing magic with maths? This is likely to generate a lot more interest than merely looking at probability on its own.

Also, you will benefit greatly from understanding how your students function in the environment. Do the lights provide a glare for some students? Is the whiteboard unreadable for others? These are general teaching strategies and such pedagogical knowledge can be found in various books on teaching in FE. These, and many others, are worth exploring because they can play a major role in whether your students will learn or not. After all, if they have had poor experiences of English and maths at school, the addition of other barriers will only complicate matters.

Learning Exercise

For each of your students, list two pieces of information that you know about them but that is not related to the course. Can this information be useful for your planning?

Identify Aspects of English and Maths and Emphasise What your Students can Do

This is particularly important for embedding English and maths because for a lot of your students, these areas will seem irrelevant and merely ‘bolted on’ to their course. You will need to illustrate that although English and maths are subjects in their own right, they are also essential ingredients of the subjects your students are studying. For instance, they may know to use twice as much peroxide as tint to colour hair but do they recognise that through this process they have begun to understand ratio?

Use personal experiences to tailor your teaching to personal needs and tastes in order to challenge individual weaknesses. For example, if you know a particular student has barriers with maths, you may wish to embed some of these skills within an activity (without making them explicit for the student), and point out what skills they have achieved once they are happy that they have met the session's aim. This can help to reduce poor perceptions of ability.

Build on Students' Strengths and Utilise their Ambitions and Personal Interests

You may have a student who would love to have completed an A level in English yet exhibits poor linguistic ability. What can she do? Does she excel in some areas yet (perhaps through barriers in perceived ability) struggle to achieve in others? In this instance, her ambition is a definite strength and it can be used to overcome her fears.

What are your students' interests and/or hobbies? This is contextual information that can be drawn on to maximise the efficiency of your teaching. Does Fred love fishing yet you regularly refer to this as a boring activity? Has Fred switched off through lack of respect or because you have failed to stimulate him? Does he have his own perception – now fuelled by your teaching – of what is boring? Perhaps Fred's contempt for reading is associated with school textbooks and mindless copying, or meaningless reading exercises. Did he merely skim over the words when asked to read at school? Has he reached his fifty-first birthday, despite the fact that his reading ability lies around Year 9? What fishing magazines are there to stimulate his interest in reading and to rebuild his confidence? Can you find an extract and use this for an activity? This may not be the subject that you are teaching but it could provide an essential bridge to steer Fred into other reading activities. Arguably, Fred does not link reading with fun and it is your job to build this connection.

Support and Praise

Tasmin has demonstrated that she can calculate area as part of her tiling course. Before you move her on to the next activity, give her praise for this achievement. The phrase ‘Well done!’ often works wonders. Your students have worked hard to achieve and most will wish to impress you. Show them that they have. Are they familiar with the assessment criteria? Perhaps you can tick off this achievement in the breakdown. This will help them to understand how such achievements fit in to the overall course and will enable them to identify what they need to do to succeed.

Learning Exercise

Write down one activity that you could use with your students that could be peer assessed. What prompts can you give them to guide and structure their feedback? Is there room for praise in their assessment?

Build Confidence and Self-Esteem

Although confidence and self-esteem generally go hand in hand, there are subtle differences and it may be that the distinction is relevant. Arguably, having confidence will rely on having a sufficient amount of self-esteem, as it is difficult to undertake an activity with assurance if you do not believe in yourself. However, students may perform well at times, while still feeling deep down that they are not as proficient as they would like to be. These are natural doubts, yet they need to be overcome when they affect performance. (Have a look at the concept of growth mindset in Chapter 3.)

Be Inclusive

In many ways, inclusion is what we strive for. Effective teachers want their students to learn; they want their students to progress in personal ways that learning can facilitate. They do not want to exclude anyone as they realise that is a failing on their behalf, apart from being a poor moral action. But this is far from straightforward. Consider the following scenario.

Scenario

You have just started teaching today's lesson and after your brief input you have an activity lined up that will involve collaborative learning and some exploration (with you acting as facilitator). One student is disruptive and you know that if he had stayed off again today (as he has done for the last two sessions) things would run smoothly. You try to reason with him but he becomes more disruptive, gaining an audience along the way. Before you read on, jot down two or three strategies that you could use to address this problem.

First, what is happening here? You may not wish this student any ill-feeling but don't beat yourself up for feeling that your class would be much better without him. However, don't hold on to this thought either. It is important to acknowledge your initial feelings. You are human, after all. Now, remember why you came into teaching. You probably came to help people; you may have come to help others achieve what you have achieved and to overcome personal challenges. All your learners are important to you, so knowing them will help you to understand them better and how best to ensure they are included.

There will be a reason why this student acts in this way, and just because the others are seemingly conforming does not mean that they are learning or that they are happy. Talk to the student and try to get some feedback. Are there barriers that you can identify? (You can refer to Chapter 7 on inclusion for help on this.) The purpose of identifying barriers is to support your students, but it can be difficult if these barriers are related to maths or English and the pressure is on for you to embed these skills.

What is needed is a culture of success, backed by a belief that all can achieve.

(Black, 2001, p18)

PGCE (Postgraduate Certificate in Education) students often state that they cannot teach maths (and English, b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Introduction
• 1 Incorporating English and Maths
• 2 Policy and Context
• 3 Theories on, and Around, Learning
• 4 Strategies for Embedding Maths
• 5 Strategies for Embedding — English
• 6 Technology-enhanced Learning
• 7 Embedding for Inclusion
• 8 Health and Social Care Case Study
• 9 Motor Vehicle Studies Case Study
• 10 Hair and Beauty Case Study
• 11 Construction Case Study
• Appendix
• References
• Index