Using CENTURY nuggets to plan lessons

CENTURY is an AI-powered online learning platform that personalises learning and provides teachers with actionable insights to support their teaching. Taryn Davison, a former primary teacher now on our Customer Success team, leads training on how best to use the platform. Wanting to see how to better incorporate our data insights, she taught a CENTURY maths lesson weekly for half a term to a Year 4 class at St. John’s C of E Primary School, Abram. Part of Quest Academy Trust, St. John’s has been using CENTURY for the past six years. This blog series shares her findings.

Planning lessons often involves the challenge of determining the key focus areas without an understanding of the class’s prior knowledge. As teachers, we need to identify what students must understand to achieve the lesson objective and then break down that learning into manageable chunks that can be taught sequentially. Experienced teachers typically develop this intuition over time, relying on their subject and pedagogical knowledge. However, for PGCE students, Early Career Teachers, or those who have moved to a new year group and are teaching unfamiliar concepts, this process can be daunting.

I wanted to explore how CENTURY can be a valuable tool in guiding lesson planning, particularly for structuring my teaching more effectively. This is something that we mention during teacher trainings, but I wanted to explore in more depth how to leverage the platform’s resources to inform my lesson plans, ensuring that each lesson is aligned with students’ needs and progresses logically towards the learning objectives.

Rounding Decimals to a Whole Number: A Teaching Approach

In Year 3, students learn to round numbers to 10 and 100, and in Year 4, to 1000. Rounding decimals is a natural extension of this skill. However, planning a lesson on this topic can be challenging without knowing how much students remember from previous lessons. This is where CENTURY proved invaluable.

Lesson planning with CENTURY:

By examining the sequence of questions in the CENTURY nugget on “Rounding Decimals to the Nearest Whole Number” (PM4.13), I was able to structure my lesson effectively. The nugget’s questions provided a clear progression: starting with identifying whole numbers on either side of a decimal, moving on to pictorially representing rounding on a number line, and culminating in more complex problems. I used these questions as mini learning steps to guide my teaching.

Whole-class instruction:

For the whole-class portion of the lesson, to help students practise rounding, I printed blank number lines from a CENTURY question for students to use. The instruction focused on teaching the skills needed to answer questions 1 through 6 in the nugget. I encouraged students to use the number lines unless they were already comfortable with the concept. This segment took about 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of independent work on the corresponding CENTURY nugget (moving straight to the assessment questions).

Data-driven differentiation:

The remainder of the lesson was informed by data from the CENTURY Nuggets Tab. I identified which questions students struggled with and provided targeted activities based on their performance:

• Q1-4 incorrect: Practise rounding on a number line with O.Th numbers.
• Q5-6 incorrect: Practise rounding on a number line with TO.Th numbers.
• Q7-8 incorrect: Multi-step problems involving rounding.
• 100% correct: Continue on their Recommended Path to address other learning gaps.

Key Takeaways

• • The use of teaching, number line and practice questions worked, as shown by the data above. Using CENTURY in this way allows the small number of errors still remaining to be identified quickly.
  • The final questions in primary maths nuggets often test greater depth and require specific strategies. Although I didn’t do this in my lesson, going forward, regularly discussing how to approach these questions can help students become more comfortable with exam-style questions in a low-stakes environment.
  • For new teachers or those unfamiliar with teaching younger students, CENTURY is a valuable resource. By watching videos and reviewing questions, teachers can better understand how to structure lessons and break down concepts effectively. 

Tune in next week to hear how Taryn used CENTURY data to plan interventions. To learn more about how CENTURY can be used to support trainee teachers, read our case study here.