Dr Colin Foster

A lot has changed in the world since our previous LUMEN blogpost. I have tried to avoid burdening everyone with unnecessary communications this term, but I wanted to let you know now how we are moving forward with the LUMEN work this academic year. I have two positive things to report.

Given that we are unable to host face-to-face events this academic year, we are instead presenting a series of free online professional development videos, each about 40 minutes long, available here. This collection will grow as we receive more videos and put them up on the site during the year, and we hope that everyone will find many that are of interest. Some are presented by colleagues here from within our Mathematics Education Centre, and others by external experts within mathematics education. This year, we are expanding LUMEN beyond secondary to include primary/early years teachers, and some of the videos will be tagged as having been designed mainly with secondary teachers in mind, others mainly for primary/early years teachers, and others for anyone. I am delighted that Dr Ems Lord, Director of NRICH, has very kindly produced two excellent videos for us, covering similar ground, one for primary and one for secondary, and we also have an excellent video on task design from Chris McGrane. Do make use of these and let us have any feedback (email to lumen@lboro.ac.uk) so that we can develop this collection of resources across the year. We have lots more videos in the pipeline, so please keep an eye out for this.

You may have seen on Twitter that Craig Barton, a Visiting Fellow at the Mathematics Education Centre and host of the Mr Barton Maths Podcast, has recently launched a Research in Action Podcast Mini-Series featuring academics from our Mathematics Education Centre. There are 10 of these, and Craig is releasing two every week. They include really practical applications of mathematics education and cognitive science research to the classroom, and I would thoroughly recommend them. Click here to listen, and follow @LboroMEC and @mrbartonmaths on Twitter to keep updated.

We have avoided organising any synchronous online events this term for obvious reasons, but we would be very happy to consider setting up some in the new year if people feel that attending would be feasible – please let us know your thoughts (email to lumen@lboro.ac.uk).

With best wishes for the end of term and the new year.

Colin Foster

Director of LUMEN (Loughborough University Mathematics Education Network)

Reader in Mathematics Education, Mathematics Education Centre, Loughborough University