Bath in Stone Walk

At ASE west we use the expertise of Elizabeth Devon from the Earth Science unit a lot. Her training sessions are always excellent and her knowledge is vast.

We found out that she does walks around Bath looking at the rocks and explaining their geology. As it was a walk for science teachers we could do it for free!

Elizabeth gave us all hand lenses and we started with a brief description of the geology of the area. She used a sponge with the layers represented in colour and a removable chunk to represent the way the river had worn away the layers to form the bowl Bath is in. The top layer is the famous Bath stone.

Then we set off around Bath to find examples of different kinds of stone.



The Podium in Bath is built from Bath stone from two different quarries. You can see the different colours.

Bath stone is a limestone and was formed in the Jurassic era when the British Isles were very much further south than they are now. The same conditions exist in the Caribbean today. We examined the Bath stone on the obelisk in Queen Square and saw the tiny round holes that once contained ooids.




This paving stone shows that it was formed in a river bed. The asymmetrical ripples show there was water and it was moving in one direction. It is known as Pennant Sandstone.


These curb stone are igneous rock as you can see the crystals. It is granite.


The light mark in this cobble stone is known as a devil's toenail and is a little fossil.




You can see from this image where cobble stones have been replaced with a different type of stone.

It is fair to say that I had never considered the paving stones as telling us much about Geology.

Besides the sedimentary Bath stone, there is also a lot of good examples of igneous rocks to be found in Bath.



These stones have been made from volcanic ash, although it is hard to tell as it is too fine to see any crystals. The marks are known as volcanic bombs and the shape indicates the stream it was formed in.





Light coloured, large crystals, means we have an igneous rock formed from the continental plate and it is granite.






These images of granite show that there has been two rates of cooling. It is known as shap granite and is from Cumbria.

The talk was so interesting, but I didn't have to make note as Thematic Trails have published a guide which we were able to buy. Below is an image of the walk you can do. We did a big section, but not all in 1.5 hours. It felt like 20 minutes.



What was fantastic is that Elizabeth was modelling the types of questioning we could use with students. For example: "Can you see the crystals? What colour is it? What conclusions can you draw?"

I would recommend anyone to have a look at the local geology and use it as a teaching tool when approaching earth science units.

A great evening!

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Location:Bath

Bristol Community Radio

Through my twitter activity, I have been invited on to the Bristol Community Radio show called Love and Science. (As it is hosted by Malcolm Love and is about science).

I was very nervous about going on the radio. Even though I knew that no one I know listens to the show.

It was interesting to meet the other guest Miranda Adi, who is the regional officer for the IoP. She was discussing all the outreach activities the IoP (institute of physics) have during the year. One that sounded interesting was the link between comedy and research, where researchers are given training in comedy and they interact with the public by doing stand up. There is an event in Bristol in the summer. I was interested and will keep and eye out in the local IoP news letter for that.

In the middle off the show Malcolm invited a young boy to discuss the experiment he had done at home. He split the stem of a flower and put half in red water, half in blue and watched as over time the petals changed colour. A simple experiment, but nice to know someone got some joy from it.

I don't feel that I was discussing science very much, more politics of education and science. But I like giving my opinions.

The one question I was asked that I couldn't answer was what one thing would I like to make a difference to science education. I should have said more time - that is what all teachers want. But really I don't know. Should I have an answer to that?

An interesting experience.


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Location:St George,Bristol,United Kingdom

Election to the ASE Assembly

I am delighted to be able to announce that I am now an elected member of the ASE assembly. So I am able to input the direction of the ASE and to science education, representing the needs and views of our members.

I really hope that through this involvement I will be able to support science teachers all over the UK and beyond.

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Location:Bristol

Student Voice

An ex-student of mine is part of an organisation known as Student Voice UK. As I write this they are representing themselves at the Time Education Festival and will be running a workshop.

The ex-student went to a talk by Claire Fox who was pretty patronising about students and pretty negative in her opinions about student voice.

This got me thinking. I am nervous about student voice in some respect. I think that it is because I worry that a personality clash between myself and a student may end up in reflecting very negatively on me. I really don't like the idea of things like ratemyteacher, where an anonymous student can make an opinion on me for the whole world to see.

However, the opinion of the students in my classroom is important to me. I do ask them what support they need and try (sometimes not successfully) to support a student in the way they want. I know better than them, I have more experience than them, but I am willing to learn from them. They see more lesson than I do. Most importantly an unhappy class group is not going to be easy to teach.

I also support student leadership in schools. I think that it is useful to have students who want to aim to be prefects (or prefect equivalents) and represent what is best about their school. Do we expect them to do that role without contributing back into the running of the school and having an opinion?

What I don't like is contrived student councils. Groups of students discussing toilets. Having to think of something during tutor time that the rep can bring up. Always these topics having to be negative. Often the representative from the tutor group being coerced by the tutor.

And I definitely don't like student observers. I think it is totally unfair. I do not think that the joint adult observer should be able to use the opinion of the student against you. I have 25-30 observers in my room already, ask them for an opinion if you need one.

Learning should not only be about the adult knowing it all and the student being bored, but putting up with it as the teacher imparts knowledge . I believe that learning is a partnership between students and teachers and supporting student in understanding their education and asking them about their experience is an important thing. Don't get me wrong I don't think that students should have it all (or even mostly) their own way, but they can't be ignored either.

In my opinion system we have is not ready to deliver effective student voice, that is not intimidating to individual teachers, and as a starting point we need more than a tick box student council approach.



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Location:South West, UK

IoP Stimulating Physics South West Conference

At the moment I don't have any lessons on Fridays, so my request to go to the south west physics teacher conference was readily accepted by management. The conference is held in Exeter, and this was the third one.


Finding St Luke's Campus wasn't hard, I just drove straight into Exeter from junction 29 of the M5. I did miss the long stay car park on the right though. The drive only took me just over an hour despite the bad weather.

On registering I got the current pack from the science learning centres. This is always expected and gives a list of the cpd programme for the Autumn term and the advertising literature from @Bristol as well as the free pen and note pad.

The leaflet that was of most interest to me was for the festival of contemporary science. It runs on Saturday 7th July and is a series of workshops and lectures given by researchers. It looks like a fantastic day.

The introductory lecture was given by Dr Alastair Hibbins. He is the admissions tutor for Exeter University Physics Department and told us that undergraduates at Exeter can expect to do original research and should look to the research groups at the university to find out if the would enjoy it. He talked about the his research into warping electromagnetic space. I always enjoy finding out about physics at the cutting edge.

My next session was supposed to be on the topic of materials, but the session leader was delayed in traffic. So Iain Davidson from data harvest stepped in. I have never used their data logging equipment and was pleasantly surprised. What I really enjoyed was the passion of Iain for how data logging can improve the experience and understanding of students. It was infectious.

At lunch I was able to meet up with an ex colleague. The only other person I recognised as coming from a Bristol School.

After lunch I went to the IoP workshop "make and take cloud chamber". The stimulating physics network run this workshop on regular occasions and I would recommend anyone with a passing interest in particle physics and radioactivity to go along to a session. There are instructions on how to make one in May 2012's physics education journal.

The final lecture was of great interest to me. I want to run an astronomy club in school during the winter term and this give me a vast number of activities that I could use, without having to worry about using my own imagination. The lecture was called "hands-on astrophysics".

The suggestions were:
1. Day time star gazing. Print a big image of stars (eg a Hubble deep field image) and use a telescope inside a very large room to look at it. It will be the students the chance to practice using the telescope.
2. Stellarium Software. Another idea that I liked was using stellarium as you can fast forward time and see the night sky. This would be great as you could send students off with an idea of things to look for in the sky that night.
3. Showing the Formation of Galaxies. You can model the formation of the shapes of galaxies by adding fine sand to a bowl of water and stirring the water to create a vortex above the sand. When the water slows the patterns look like the shapes of galaxies.
4. The Colours of Stars. It is possible to use a CD and cereal box to create a homemade diffraction grating and look at the spectra from different bulbs and natural light.
5. Parallaxes. We were shown images of how a star might appear to change position, then how you could use a long piece of string and the type of protractor you would use on a white board to measure the angles involved in the parallax.
6. Modelling Planets. It is a common activity to model the size of plants, it can be done with fruit as an example. However we were also shown modelling of density by filling balloons with things like rice and sand. It can surprise students to see that Jupiter and Saturn can float. It was suggested that a hooller hoop can be used to model the size of the sun.
7. Exoplanets. It is interesting to include extra-solar planets in our models of planets. 750 have been found so far.
8. Top Trumps. A game of top trumps is useful to round of a lesson on planets.
9. Asteroids. It is possible to buy meteorite samples and show they are magnetic.
10. Meteorite Impacts. Using flour and a sprinkle of cocoa powder over the top it is possible to drop marbles and see the size of craters and how material is kicked up from underneath.
11. National Schools Observatory. Images can be found on the national schools observatory website and it is also possible to request for specific images to be taken especially for you.

Anyone based in the south west should strongly consider asking to go to the south west physics teacher conference. Useful information and a great positive atmosphere.




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Location:Exeter

What is Refractive Index?

The first lecture during the South West Physics Teacher Conference was entitled "Warping Electromagnetic Space: The Quest for Invisibility" by Dr Alastair Hibbins from the University of Exeter.

Dr Hibbins is part of a team trying to build metamaterials that will hide objects or make them more visible. To do that he has to use elements on the surface of materials to alter the refractive index.

What is the refractive index?

When I teach this at secondary school I just teach that light slows down in a different medium, and this is what causes the wavelength to change. There is a complicated proof involving drawing a diagram with lots of lines and comparing angles using trigonometry that generates snells law.

The idea that waves just slow down has never sat well with me. I haven't considered what really causes the effect of refraction; I didn't study this at university.

Dr Hibbins described refraction as the change in phase speed of the wave cause by the electrons in the medium being forced to vibrate by the incoming electromagnetic wave. A vibrating electron generates another electromagnetic wave, which is out of phase to the incoming wave, these two superimpose and give a wave with a shorter wavelength.

This would explain why different frequencies have different refractive indexes.

Something else that I had not considered is that you can prove snell's law using momentum as well as differentiation and how I would normally demonstrate it via trigonometry.

Developing the data analysis skills of students - attempt 1

In my year 9 lesson today (Wednesday) I am going to use a "Bad Science" resource from the Collins scheme of work. The topic is called "bad news" and in the task students have to use the same set of data to come up with evidence to support varying points of view.

To my mind the task as written in the scheme of work is not structured enough. However, it isn't that much harder than what is asked in GCSE questions. And the less structure the less scope for saying a point of view is right/wrong.

I plan to show the students how the marks for an individual science GCSE are divided up. The explain that 5% of those marks are for a "skills" question. Then I plan to give the students the "how science works" questions from the specimen OCR gateway paper, and allow the class to work on it in groups for a short period. Allowing them to see that this is a difficult topic and involves them being able to apply their skills in a variety of contexts.

This will be the focus for the next couple of weeks in lessons. (I only have them once per week). In the first lesson I plan to only use my questioning to help structure the ideas of the students and see how imaginative and logical the students are for themselves. This will give me an idea of where the students are struggling and areas of strength to base our interventions on.

The previous piece of my post was written before the lesson.

During the lesson the students attempted the past paper question and found it very difficult. They weren't best pleased by the questions and the vagueness of them. I would say that they are very hard to comprehend.

I gave them a set of data that could give rise to a variety of conclusions and each group had to make a different conclusion. They were happy to have a go at the task and come up with a variety of points of view. In order to do this they drew on their scientific knowledge and showed a good grasp of the science they have learned. However, very few were naturally looking to the data to help back up their claims.

When moving through the room and questioning the students about patterns in the data they struggled to break down then information into small enough chunks they could process and draw conclusions from. Only a few students could pick out general patterns and link them to a conclusion.

My task now is to develop activities to help these students and future year groups develop their data interpretation skills, ready for their GCSEs and for the rest of their life.


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Location:Gloucestershire