China-England Exchange Open Classrooms a huge success

The six China-England Exchange open classrooms recently tool place across two weeks from 14th January to 25th January at Holy Rosary and St Anne’s Catholic Primary School in Leeds.

 The events hosted around a total of 250 delegates, who all got to observe our two Chinese teachers, Miss Helen and Miss Juno demonstrate a typical Chinese Teaching for Mastery lesson to a room full of students.  

 The aim of the Open Classroom was to provide an insight into Teaching for Mastery and the opportunity to observe the skill and experience of the Shanghai teachers in action.  The event was a huge success, with teachers getting the opportunity to observe a Grade 5 Maths lesson on encoding focused on Chinese Identification numbers, as well as a Grade 4 Maths lesson on backwards reasoning.

 The teacher very cleverly played a game of guess the number. The children were asked to think of any number, write it down and keep it hidden. The teacher gave the children a calculation rule and asked them to use it on their number. Through a skilfully scaffolded lesson, the children were introduced to backwards reasoning and were able to calculate magic numbers themselves and were challenged to practise this at home. The representation of a tree diagram used in the lesson enabled the children to effectively visualise the small steps needed to tackle the mathematical concept.

 There was also a fascinating lesson on exploring the Rubik’s cube with Grades 3-5. The children had been taught many complicated algorithms in order to solve any scrambled cube. Children competed in a timed Rubik’s cube competition, with one child completing his in just 29 seconds.  

 Grainne Tierney ( Primary Teaching for Mastery Work Group Lead) commented “The event was a great success, and we received great feedback from those involved.  It was amazing to see how engaged the children were in the Maths lessons by learning through a real-life context”.