Mini-lessons help you make the most out of explicit teaching time by targeting direct instruction.
They are a chance for students to build conceptual knowledge in targeted small groups (groups you can access via your Group by levels page in the Diagnostic Tool).
This conceptual approach uses the 'Key Concepts' and involves a small group (ideally 6 or less) of students, so that each student can be present and interact with the teacher directly for the duration of the activity.
Mini-lessons also provide a great opportunity for students to work with their peers and for their teacher to explore how different pieces of content relate to each other, often in a hands-on way.
Mini-lessons are designed to develop broader mathematical ideas, rather than address specific issues students may have with the content they're working on. There are other approaches that are better suited to getting students unstuck; such us one-on-one interventions.
Each mini-lesson is identified by the Key Concept it's addressing. From here, you can access more details about the concept, including a suggested lesson plan. Each Key Concept has a suggested lesson plan, designed to last around half an hour and work well in groups of 4-6 students.
The lesson-plan has been carefully scaffolded so it can be used by all maths teachers, including those new to the profession or teaching out of field.
Below the concept details there is a list of students recommended for the mini-lesson. Next to each student there is a bar representation of the learning intentions relating to this key concept colour coded depending on mastered (gold) /not mastered (white) . You can see which modules the student has:
If you want to add or remove students, or just see how appropriate the mini-lesson is for other students in the class, you can click the 'add another student' link at the bottom. This will show you the full class list, and you can edit the mini-lesson as much as you'd like from here.
Three reason to use mini-lessons
The main purpose of energisers is to help provide structure to the lesson, break up overall lesson time into reasonable chunks, and reinforce students’ emotional associations within the classroom: class cohesion, connection with the teacher, and overall feeling of safety/belonging.
Because of this, energisers don’t strictly need a “mathematical” learning intention to be effective, so some are just fun short activities. However, most energisers do contribute to mathematical learning objectives. Examples include:
After you run the diagnostics with your class you can unlock FREE access to 200+ Energisers to run with your class.
Three reasons to shuffle them together randomly (rather than trying to align them to a specific learning intention)