"by teaching, we learn"
Forget the mind-boggling nature of the universe, just the Solar System is almost unimaginably huge and unimaginably empty. No textbook image or poster on a classroom wall can even begin to capture this. Surely, an awareness of the minuteness of our existence in the immensity and eternity of the cosmos, is a cultural entitlement, a […]
Read More Modelling the solar systemThe ITT Market Review report looks like a dog’s breakfast to me. Having done a bit of tweeting about it, I’m going to try to properly explain why. Please note, this is entirely a Secondary perspective although the report is trying to cover EYFS through to FE. So, here’s my starting point. I think teaching […]
Read More Sometimes it’s not just Cheams MindsetI’ve been part of a few Twitter discussions about bonds and energy. Several people have made insightful observations that have really pushed everyone’s thinking. It is brilliant when a bunch of science teachers get together and really wrestle with the potential conflict between accurate models in science, and how to make these conceptually difficult ideas […]
Read More BondageIf you haven’t read this fascinating paper by @mikehobbiss @DrSamSims and @profbeckyallen, then stop wasting your time here and go and read that instead. This is just an anecdote about forgetting my lunch. When I was nineteen, I lived and worked at Benmore Outdoor Education Centre. Back then it was a straightforward local authority outdoor […]
Read More Habit formation limits lunchMy Y6 son is in the next room, working away at an Oak National Academy English lesson. He’s dressed today, so that’s at least a small improvement on yesterday, when I realised he was still in his pyjamas as I set him his work schedule for the day. This seems like a good moment to […]
Read More Remote Learning: A parent perspectiveInteresting tweet from @griff2742 My main thought on this is “proceed with caution”. There is certainly evidence supporting interleaving, but I’m not at all convinced that evidence supports re-designing a science curriculum in a way that breaks up topics more than we already do. However, I do think it indicates we should build in regular […]
Read More Interleaving the Science Curriculum?Curriculum development is a bit like the Briggs-Rauscher reaction: back and forth, to and fro, back and forth, to and fro… For various reasons, we need to reconsider the “how to teach chemistry” we include in the @SotonEd PGCE Secondary Science programme. The majority of our partnership schools are 11-16, so our trainee teachers typically […]
Read More Reviewing the chemistry curriculum – wisdom of crowdsSchool Science is stuffed full of declarative knowledge, which comes in lots of different forms and has to be applied in lots of different ways. I think this makes it hard to teach well. I’ve written about the basic approach I share with the trainee teachers at the University of Southampton in a couple of […]
Read More Teaching Procedural KnowledgeA very long time ago, in a school far, far away (well, a fair way along the A27), I did a TeachMeet presentation on using Venn diagrams and another categorisation exercise. The rough transcript is here, but I’ve just found this list of things in KS3 and the GCSE specifications, that I meant to post […]
Read More Venn and the Art of CategorisationI love teaching science, but I think it’s a hard subject to teach well. Of course it’s easy to see the challenges in your own area of expertise and gloss over the ones in other subjects but science has a lot of content – a lot of declarative knowledge – and lots of different ways […]
Read More Teaching Declarative Knowledge: Part 2
docendo discimus 