Initial Teacher Training - Mathematics: Secondary with Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) PGDE

This PGDE course prepares you for a fulfilling career as an innovative and creative teacher of Mathematics, to enable you to deliver an engaging and inspirational education to pupils. You can look forward to practical workshops, seminars and lead lectures to explore the context of pupils attainment in Mathematics. Explore how Mathematics “is a creative and highly interconnected discipline that has been developed over centuries, providing the solution to some of history’s most intriguing problems” (National Curriculum 2014 purpose of study).

During your training you will focus on signature pedagogies for Mathematics emphasising how the subject is taught, challenging common misconceptions in the subject, and barriers to learning. Sessions will help you deepen your understanding of the role and nature of Mathematics in the curriculum and your own personal philosophy for teaching. You will explore the importance of your subject, how children learn and develop a rigorous understanding of the nature of Mathematics education, and the important role that Mathematics plays in everyday life. These sessions will help you identify strategies to support how children learn in the subject.

The aims of the National Curriculum for Mathematics state that children should:

• become fluent in the fundamentals of Mathematics, including through varied and frequent practice with increasingly complex problems over time, so that pupils develop conceptual understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge rapidly and accurately
• reason Mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using Mathematical language
• be able to solve problems by applying their Mathematics knowledge to a variety of routine and non-routine problems with increasing sophistication, including breaking down problems into a series of simpler steps and persevering in seeking solutions

In addition to sessions developing your understanding of teaching and learning in Mathematics, subject knowledge workshops will explore the key knowledge and skills that define the subject; and are supported by your subject knowledge development and didactics journal.