Maggie: We were suffering badly from limited resources. Now that problem has been addressed by an amazing amount of financial input, and also from being allowed to pilot some resources for some companies - and one of these was Thinking Skills by Anne Kite which developed the children's awareness of how they were thinking and going about things and that's a tremendous resource of – people should think about that one.
Kathleen: They got together and they drew up a whole school plan, worked it out in levels rather than in stages, and basically looked at six strategies that they wanted to develop through the school and within each strategy they compiled activities from a huge range of resources. Teachers also have a list of websites for problem solving, where in their own CPD time they can dip in and find out more ways of challenging the pupils.
Once the programme was made up and the resource bank was in place we allocated part of an inset day where we had every class teacher there. All the materials were laid out for them and we actually went into groups where we used the materials.
David:: We use Fun Maths problem solving boxes which the children particularly enjoy using. They allow children to tackle problems which are specific to their ability-range, they allow them to tackle them with a little bit more independence, and they can choose which problems they solve. They range from anything from particularly easy ones right up to particularly difficult ones, so the children will work on that. It's a resource that you can use with an entire class and that's the great thing about it, the children can work independently, they can talk to one another, they can bounce ideas off one another and they can de-brief one another.
We also have another range of resources which we used to teach specific problem solving strategies. There's some work in Heinemann maths but we also use the Scottish Maths Challenge resource material as well. Those challenges are particularly difficult and they do need a lot of input at the beginning, so we do take a look very carefully how we will start the problem.
Neil: The first part was from Lothian region Developing 5-14 Problem solving in Mathematics, and the second part came from Fife which was called 'Developing Strategy'.