What a year it has been for the AMSP sustained courses team! We were in the middle of running face-to-face study days when the first lockdown was announced. It was immediately clear that a major rethink of our delivery plans was needed… and quick!
Most of our sustained courses already included an online element, complemented by face-to-face study days. So the team leapt into action and adapted the study days to work in an online environment. We’ve continued to offer them in this way, enabling teachers from our autumn 2020 and spring 2021 cohorts to participate fully, regardless of their local circumstances.
Our Teaching A level Mathematics (TAM) course, however, was a different case. It includes formative lesson observation and couldn’t easily be adapted to run online. Instead, we created a new online course, Pedagogy for A level Mathematics (PALM), which focuses on developing pedagogy for teachers new to teaching A level Mathematics. The first iteration ran in autumn 2020 with seven groups, followed by a further three groups in spring 2021. The course is now established as a member of our suite of sustained courses and will run again in 2021-22… the silver lining of a huge cloud!
Adapting the courses meant a lot of extra work for the team, but it was well worth it. We’re delighted that over the last 14 months more than 750 teachers have participated in our sustained courses – a fantastic result in such challenging times.
Looking to autumn 2021
As we’re all aware, the future still holds some uncertainty and so we’re offering applicants of Teaching Further Mathematics 1 (TFM1), Teaching Mechanics 1 (TM1), and Teaching Statistics 1 (TS1) a choice of online or face-to-face study days. Teaching Discrete Mathematics 1 (TD1) currently offers face-to-face study days, but an online-only version may also run if there’s enough demand.
One of the strengths of the TAM course is teachers experiencing a classroom environment on study days and then receiving in-school visits to help make the link between the theory of the course and the practice of the classroom. We’ve delayed the start of the course until November but we’re expecting a real buzz on the first TAM study days. We’re so looking forward to this after a gap of more than a year and a half!
Applications for the autumn 2021 sustained courses are now open. Head over to the AMSP website for an overview of our sustained courses and all the related course listings.
